Page 1

The Amateur Computerist

httpwwwaisorg~jrhacn

Summer 2008 lsquoAcross the Great Wallrsquo Volume 16 No 2

CelebrationThe First Email Message from China to CSNET

(Composed 14 Sept 1987 sent 20 Sept 1987)

A celebration of the 20th anniversary of thefirst email message that was sent from China to theworld via the international Computer Science Net-work (CSNET) was held at the Hasso Plattner In-stitute in Potsdam Germany on September 18-19

Table of ContentsCelebration Page 1Panel Discussion Page 2Werner Zorn Interview Page 12Cordial Thanks to our Friends Page 13Steps Toward China on the Internet Page 14Netizens and the New News Page 15Conference Presentation Videos Online Page 22Context for the Spread of CSNET Page 22Netizen Journalism An Interview Page 27Webpage httpwwwaisorg~jrhacnACn16-2pdf

2007 Participating were international Internet pio-neers representatives of the Internet in China andhistorians and journalists

From 1983 to 1987 two teams of scientistsand engineers worked to overcome the technicalfinancial and geographic obstacles to set up anemail connection between China and the interna-tional CSNET One team was centered aroundWerner Zorn at Karlsruhe University in the FederalRepublic of Germany The other team was underthe general guidance of Wang Yuenfung at the In-stitute for Computer Applications (ICA) in the Peo-plersquos Republic of China The project succeededbased on the scientific and technical skill andfriendship resourcefulness and dedication of themembers of both teams

The first successful email message was senton Sept 20 1987 from Beijing to computer scien-tists in Germany the US and Ireland The China-CSNET connection was granted official recogni-tion and approval on Nov 8 1987 when a lettersigned by the Director of the US National ScienceFoundation Division of Networking and Commu-nications Research and Infrastructure StephenWolff was forwarded to the head of the Chinesedelegation Yang Chuquan at an InternationalNetworkshop in the US From then on more andmore of the scientific community in China had thepossibility of email contact with their colleaguesand friends throughout the world In 1994 via aconnection between China and the US China es-tablished full general Internet connectivity beyondjust email

But there is more to the story of the first emailmessage

Over the years especially since the middle1990s Internet access and Internet use has spreadthroughout China Celebrations have occasionallybeen held to mark milestones of Internet history in

Page 2

China But curiously the role of Werner Zorn andWang Yuenfung was absent or minimized in thetelling of the early roots of the Chinese connectionto the Internet

In 2004 two Amateur Computerist editors lo-cated and interviewed Werner Zorn in Berlin Heshared his memories of the events of 1983 to 1987and backed his memories up with documents fromthat period One editor took up to write an articleabout this history His research took him mostly toweb sites in China The story told there gave mostcredit for the China-CSNET connection to a Chi-nese engineer Qian Tianbai whom Zorn hadhardly mentioned Mostly missing from the historyon the websites in China was the internationalcomponent which Zorn had stressed

Qian Tianbairsquos name is not among the 13 sig-natures on the first email message and there wasevidence that he was not in China at the time Zornwas able to provide a copy of the letter signed byStephen Wolff Through further digging and viaemail correspondence with two of the Chinese sig-natories of the first email message it was possibleto corroborate Zornrsquos telling of the events

An article was written and published in theAmateur Computerist telling the corroborated storyof the first email from China to CSNET giving jus-tified credit to Wang and Zorn and their teams andto Lawrence Landweber of the CSNET and Ste-phen Wolff A bit later Zorn was invited to tell thestory at a panel planned for Nov 2005 in conjunc-tion with the United Nations World Summit onInformation Society (WSIS) in Tunis

Present in Tunis when Zorn presented his tell-ing of the international effort and collaborationespecially between himself and Wang Yuenfungwas Madame Hu Qiheng Vice President ChinaAssociation for Science and Technology andChair of Internet Society of China She rose andspoke of her friendship with Qian Tianbai but saidshe would investigate why the story told in Chinadiffered from the one Zorn told Eighteen monthslater entries on the official CNNIC websiteInternet Timeline of China 1987~1996 werechanged to give proper credit to the work of Zornand Wang their teams and the international effortthat made possible the first email connectivity be-tween China and the world via CSNEThttpwwwcnnicnetcnhtmlDir200312122000htm

So on Sept 18 and 19 2007 the celebrationwas held with Hu Qiheng Werner Zorn LawrenceLandweber Stephen Wolff and others participat-ing It was the 20 anniversary of the first emailth

message and a time when the same history wasrecognized in Germany and China As Hu Qihengsaid in her presentation

The international collaboration in science andtechnology is the driving force for computernetworking across the country borders and fa-cilitating the early Internet development inChina Among them the collaborations ofCANET [China Academic Network] of Chinawith Karlsruhe University and the CSNETBITNET of the US had contributed directly tothe introduction of Internet into ChinaThe achievement of the CSNET email connec-

tivity with China was based on the collaboration ofProfessors Zorn and Wang and their teams Theachievement of an accurate telling of that historyin China was the result of collaboration of Profes-sor Zorn and Mdm Hu Both these achievementswere celebrated in Potsdam in September 2007This issue of the Amateur Computerist gatherssome documents from that celebration

The story of this first email message has been toldin the Amateur Computerist A video presentationby Werner Zorn of this history can be viewed athttpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3202html[See httpaisorg~jrhacnACn13-1pdf andhttpaisorg~jrhacnACn15-2pdf]

[Editorrsquos note The following is an edited transcriptof the panel of Internet pioneers at the Potsdamcelebration]

Panel Discussion TheRoad to the First Email

Date September 19 2007

Location Hasso Plattner Institute Potsdam Germany

Moderator Dennis Jennings first director of the US

National Science Foundation Net (NSFNET)

Panel

Jay Hauben Internet historian Amateur Computerist News-

letter Editor

Prof Hu Qiheng Chairwoman Internet Society of China

(ISC) Honorary Member of China Association for Science

and Technology member of Chinese Academy of Engineering

Page 3

and the Chair of Steering Committee for CNNIC

Daniel Karrenberg Chairman Board of Trustees of the

Internet Society (ISOC)

Prof Lawrence H Landweber Co-Founder of the Computer

Science Net (CSNET)

Dr Stephen S Wolff second director of the National Science

Foundation Net (NSFNET)

Prof Werner Zorn Hasso Plattner Institute

Zorn Hello I welcome you and welcome thepanel I want to introduce a little the persons on thepanel

I start with Dennis Jennings He is sitting in themiddle Because of his smart IrishEnglish accentI chose him to chair the panel He was so friendlyhe could not resist and say he would not do the jobBut he is also a very important person in network-ing Dennis was the director of EARN the IBMdriven or based European Academic Research Net-work in the 1980s So Europe was for a while hisjob Underneath him were the directors in the dif-ferent countries Then his most prominent job wasthe project leader of the NSFNET project in 1986-1987 the supercomputer network in the UnitedStates He came from Dublin and spent a yearthere

Jennings Fifteen months

Zorn Fifteen months You see he is one of thecornerstones in networking

Larry Landweber is for me the father of scien-tific networking He ran the InternationalAcademic Networkshops He was one of thefounders perhaps the originator of the CSNETidea in the early 1980s propagating the idea ofconnecting all the different networks first throughemail and then migrating to other services Larryorganized these academic networkshops every yearin different places So he gave me the chance toalso travel around the world It was very nice andalso very productive Larry was later president ofthe Internet Society for two years in the early lsquo90safter Vint Cerf Larry became our good friend Soand helped us backed me behind the stage

Stephen Wolff was director of the networkingnetwork project within the National Science Foun-dation for ten years a long time during the impor-tant years in the lsquo80s and also in the lsquo90s Stevegave that important signature to us He represented1

the policy from the NSF side toward networking

We will ask him later why his signature was soimportant What would we have done without it Itwas one of my questions And he is now withCisco for five years

Daniel Karrenberg is originally coming fromDortmund Dortmund was a second source besides2

Karlsruhe We were two friendly connected insti-3

tutes Dortmund was origin coming from the Unixnetwork side and Karlsruhe by CSNET Danielemigrated quite early to the Netherlands We mayask why you emigrated and went to the Center forMathematics and Informatics (CWI) in the Nether-lands the Institute which later ran the RIPE regis-try which became one of the most important regis-tries in the world RIPE covers 30 percent of all IPaddresses very important which cover a big partof the northern hemisphere

Stephen and Daniel have been honored withthe John Postal Award Stephen in 2002 andDaniel in 2001 Is that correct

Karrenberg 2001 I believe I am not sure

Zorn I think you were honored because of every-thing both running services and also for your con-tribution in the IETF with the RFCs to prolong thelife time of IPv4 address space through ClasslessInter-Domain Routing (CIDA) That was one verybig contribution The Internet is alive more thanten years later because CIDA solved a problemthreatening the Internet You can perhaps say a fewwords to that

And Stephen Wolff of course for his importantrole with a big governmental project

Madame Qiheng Hu has introduced herselfthrough her speeches while the others were onlysitting and listening She is the president of what Iguess very soon will be the largest Internet Societyof the world

Hu The Internet Society of China which began in2001

Zorn China has more than 160 million Internetparticipants

I think Mdm Hu entered networking in1994Was that the year when you entered into net-work management

Page 4

Hu Not really management merely I was amongthe people who did urge the Internet to enterChina

Then in 1994 with your help Prof Zorn wemoved the cn domain name server from KarlsruheUniversity to China where it started to work onMay 1 In 1997 the CNNIC was approved by theChinese governmental authority The number ofChinese people online started to grow fast In May2001 we established the Internet Society of Chinaand to our great honor we successfully hosted the2002 ISOC Conference in Shanghai Today thenumber of Internet users in China approaches 200million

Zorn Last before I sit here modestly I want tointroduce Jay

Jay Hauben helped me to bring our story intorecognition and he plays a role of a historian hereon the panel He is at the Columbia University andedits the Amateur Computerist newsletter or maga-zine And Ronda Hauben will give a speech onNetizens this afternoon She coauthored a bookabout netizens

Jay is the most most accurate writer andresearcher I ever met For whatever I said he an-swered ldquoProve itrdquo So I had to set up all the con-tacts through my old Chinese friends and get mate-rial out of my archives And he pushed and pushedand pushed me And finally he believed what Isaid But I had to prove everything And now onthe panel his role will be to raise a finger and sayall what you do should be written down otherwiseit will be forgotten That is also maybe one of thetopics of our discussion to keep that in mind andon paper not only on CDs

Ok So far my introduction so you will knowwhy these people are all my companions in differ-ent stages of what I did I am really happy that youall came here Without any one of you we wouldnot have completed that route So I really feelhappy now to have everybody here that you saw inmy slides Everyone is here exact perhaps DaveFarber but he was a little bit further from me NowI want to express my thanks again that you havecome so we can have a small but very high levelInternet summit Would you agree

One more question Most of us met last at theInternet Society yearly conference in Washington

in 2002 I think that was the last INET conferenceWhy wasnrsquot the tradition continued

Landweber I think that their time had passed

Zorn Thatrsquos an interesting point Ok Now I stop with the introductions and sit

here And Dennis it is your turn now

Jennings Werner thank you very much indeedAnd thank you for managing all those introduc-tions which saved me a tremendous amount ofwork as the moderator of this panel

First of all my apologies I speak neither Ger-man nor Chinese So I will speak in English andIrsquoll do my best to be understood

It occurs to me as I look around and as I talkto people young and indeed old that now use theInternet that most people just simply assume theInternet is there It works All the things that weuse that they use day to day has always been thereas far as they are concerned And they have noconception of the background or the history or thestruggles that went into creating this thing calledthe Internet Thatrsquos the first question I would liketo put to each member of the panel What nowseems so simple and so obvious Larry was it al-ways like this or were there was it different Whatare the war stories behind the story

Landweber If we go back to the 1980s early1980s there was a research project that DARPA4

had supported that developed TCPIP But therewas no Internet In the early 1980s the USDefense Department and the National ScienceFoundation were interested in exploring buildingthe Internet On the other hand there was an inter-national standards effort called OSI for Open Sys-tems Interconnection and officially every govern-ment in the world except perhaps Finland sup-ported the OSI effort Hundreds of millions per-haps billions of dollars were spent on the develop-ment of a protocol suite that would become inter-national standards And most countries of theworld the national science foundations would notput money into internet development including inGermany and also the United States except for theDefense Department NSF and maybe the Depart-ment of Energy There was very little support forthe Internet Companies like IBM and Digital

Page 5

Equipment were actively not supportive of theInternet So in fact there was a major struggle toget the Internet supported Internet developmentand the building of testbeds initially

Should I keep going for a few minutes

Jennings Yes please

Landweber So here we are in the 1980s and theInternet is really a stepchild and not very far alongWell myself Dave Farber a couple of others pro-posed CSNET and CSNET was funded by the Na-5

tional Science Foundation Soon after I went toBob Kahn who was the DARPA person (of Cerfand Kahn who first conceived of the TCPIP pro-tocol) Bob gave us permission to set up interna-tional gateways so that email and other connec-tions from other parts of the world would allowdata to flow into the US networks including theARPANET and other Internet connected networksOne of the very first connections we made was toGermany I never throw anything out so I haveearly email from 1983 that I think is the first emailI got from you Werner asking about a connectionto Germany from CSNET And we approved thegateway and worked on it Now there were prob-lems Werner has talked about the technical prob-lems I mean everything was flakey The softwarewe had for supporting Internet protocols was notrobust The network connections were not robustAs you heard he had to tie together a satellite linkand X25 links and then go across to the UnitedStates and use this PMDF which was mail relaysoftware So it was not trivial technically

But I guess as hard maybe harder were thepolitical problems So in the United States Ste-phen Wolff gave us permission to have the gate-way to China in 1987 What was not mentionedwas the next day he told us permission wasrevoked It was the White House that had inter-vened and told Steve that permission was not to begiven And Steve had this wonderful philosophywhich helped make the NSFNET so successfulWhich was you donrsquot ask permission in advanceYou ask forgiveness afterwards And so he I thinkmaybe winked at us and we also decided well itrsquosjust the White House and wersquore academics TheWhite House we can ignore them So we actuallyignored the order to turn off the connection to

China and that was something that I think was veryimportant

But then there also were political problems thatwe experienced with Germany which maybeWerner is not completely familiar with I was get-ting messages from DFN the German NationalNetwork DFN was 100 percent behind the OSIeffort Very very large amounts of money werebeing spent by DFN with German industry anduniversities to develop the OSI protocols Some-time around 1986 or 7 I started getting messagesfrom DFN people asking us to disconnect the gate-way to Karlsruhe and connect directly to DFN Myview is that you support the people who have donethe work and who are the good people And in factthe workshops that I organized each year were setup to bring the visionaries from each countrytogether the people who really were beginning toinvestigate the Internet In Germany that wasWerner Zorn And so CSNET refused to do thedisconnection I never throw anything out so Iwent and read all the emails which were asking meto do that So there were political problems alsoWe learned a number of lessons from this activity

Jennings Daniel can you pick that up becausecertainly I remember the protocol wars One of theastonishing things was not just the amount ofmoney that Larry has referred to but the vicious-ness the interpersonal fighting that went on Thepeople were trying actively to disrupt non OSI ac-tively Daniel do you want to talk a little bit aboutthat

Karrenberg OK Irsquoll talk a little about that but Iwonrsquot go into the fighting part But first just to ex-plain a little bit the question about ldquoWas itobviousrdquo No it was not obvious I was in a placeI was a student an undergraduate student inDortmund The only thing we wanted was emailWe didnrsquot have any sort of political agenda orwhatever no vision We just wanted email We didnot have any money We still wanted email Andwe found some allies in the Computer Science de-partment there They had some visiting professorswho actually said we will only come to Dortmundif there is email This was in 1982 I believe lsquo81lsquo82 timeframe And we were also running Unix atthe time which wasnrsquot quite so popular and wewere only allowed to do that at night During the

Page 6

daytime the computers were used for serious pur-poses In the evenings we could do Unix And atthat time we heard about this Unix network thisUUCP network that was going on We had all thesoftware so we didnrsquot have that problem But howdo you connect How do you connect internation-ally The only way we could do that was throughthe telephone very much like Wernerrsquos first at-tempt to do the China thing

We had a little bit of an easier task because weonly had to connect to the next country the Neth-erlands And we did that We found some modemsand connected to them and got our email and ournet use

At some point the phone bills were so signifi-cant at the departmental level and questions wereasked And we explained and that was fine Thenother places in Germany running Unix also wantedto connect and they connected to us This waspurely lsquostore and forwardrsquo Your email mail wouldtake a day to get somewhere because it had to bewritten on one computer stored there They had tomake a telephone connection stored on the nextcomputer store and forward We could have emailconversations with like-minded people in the USfor instance that would be a message a day Butthat was tremendous I mean compared to postalmail and so forth That was fine

At some point this grew and I remember veryvividly how we were trying to find ways of actu-ally keeping it going financially It was very verydifficult in those times And if you are sitting in aninstitute like this itrsquos hard to imagine but twentyyears ago more than 20 years ago universitieswere basically state institutions run by state rulesrun by national rules and run by civil servants Itwas incredibly hard to take money into thoseplaces especially if it wasnrsquot like for big projectsit was just to pay the phone bill And so we had toovercome that kind of thing And the next thingwas we had to break the law because at some pointwe wanted faster speed and automatic dialing sothat when the international phone rates becamecheaper I think it was 1000pm or 1100pm at thetime we would not have to go into the computerroom and actually dial Amsterdam So we wantedan autodialer and we wanted quicker modems Andit was actually on the statute books a crime or anoffence Irsquom not sure The title of the law the Ger-man title of the law is Fernmeldeanlagengesetz I

donrsquot know whether it still exists But it was acriminal offense to connect anything that was notapproved by the state run PTT to the telephonenetwork And we were doing like ok do we reallywant this There is approved equipment but it isway beyond our budget So we went to our direc-tor Dr Rudolf Pater who is one of the other un-sung heroes of this and said we have this problemHe said ldquoya we donrsquot have the budgetrdquo We saidwe have this other solution We know it works Weknow it wonrsquot break the phone system They use itin the Netherlands Can we use that And he saidldquoI donrsquot want to know about itrdquo So we said wewant to buy it and itrsquos not that cheap It was likeabout what today would be 2 or 3 personalcomputers worth of money And we said we havealready talked to some of the visiting professorsand some of the other academics and we will justall chip in and we will buy it He said ldquoNa let meseerdquo And then sort of magically a week later wewere asked what is the specification of this stuffWhere can we buy it And it was actually boughtwith public money And I never know what it wassupposed to be that we ordered there That kind ofstuff And that kind of stuff is really the resistancethat you have to overcome And then the criminaloffence too And all these kinds of things And ofcourse we also had this experience when this grewand had like 50 60 70 80 places connected inGermany we faced resistance like ldquoYou are notdoing the right thing You are just making thingswork We want to do the politically correct thingrdquoAnd we were a bit more resilient to the kind of ap-proach that Larry just related because we were ac-tually funded by a big number of participants andwe werenrsquot in that sense part of the academic es-tablishment But it was quite clear that there wastremendous pressure put on the university to actu-ally either stop this altogether or play it down DrPater was one of the people who actually resistedthat

Can I do one more minute

Jennings Yes please

Karrenberg One day we have this meeting everyweek to see how things are going with the net-works thing and he goes I got a letter from thedean of the department He commends us on ourgood work facilitating the visiting professors and

Page 7

all that kind of stuff And he is really happy withwhat we are doing This is fine

At the same time I was in another function Iwas a student representative in university govern-ment Two weeks later in my pile of papers thissame letter appears And at the end there is a para-graph that says ldquoand by the way you are not sup-posed to become the German central hub of thisrdquoSo I see this and go hmmm and take the letter andgo to Dr Paterrsquos office and say ldquoHey did youmiss the last paragraphrdquo And he goes like ldquoOnetwo three hellip Daniel I chose to ignore thatrdquo

Jennings Steve tell us about what you chose toignore

Wolff It was not as much a matter of ignoringthings as trying to make it obvious to the right peo-ple You see by the time I got to the NSF afterDennis had broken the soil the notion of theInternet was obvious to computer scientistsbecause they had CSNET They knew it workedThey knew what it would do It was obvious touniversity IT departments because they hadBITNET They knew what it could do And it wasobvious to computational physicists because theyhad MFENET and NSFNET and they knew what itcould do But in total thatrsquos a very small popula-tion And in fact people who ran much of theNSFNET the regional networks were based instate run universities and many of them had bettheir careers and their jobs on making the networkwork So part of my job was to make it obvious tothe people who gave them money So I spent agreat deal of time talking to associations of stategovernors to a group of comptrollers of states tell-ing them that the money was not being badly sentSo most of my job was actually marketing tryingto convince people that this was a good thing andthe money was not being wasted

It seems as though each consistency had itsown vision of what the network was going to doIrsquom not sure what computer scientists thoughtabout it It was very clear what IT professionalswanted from it And it was perfectly obvious whatcomputational physicists wanted out of the net-work And they havenrsquot changed in twenty yearsThey wanted more faster But what is clear to menow is that the essential thing is that everyone hasa vision The hardest part of my job was trying to

communicate that vision to sufficiently many com-munities so it would catch hold somewhere

Jennings Werner letrsquos come back to you Tell usa little bit of the battle in Germany

Zorn Larry told something about the politicalpressure in the lsquo80s When we started with the ser-vices we expected that everybody would be happyin the German networking community But espe-cially in the German Research Network the DFNjust the opposite was the case I asked myselfwhat what is going on here We succeeded in ourproject but then those who gave the money or hasthe job to do that refused to accept that That wasthe signal that something is wrong in the system Iwas convinced that if their position is wrong oursmust be better or right So it was really a thingbetween right and wrong And of course we werefighting for our way Steversquos philosophy Larrytold us was donrsquot ask for permission before butask for forgiveness after It was the same thing ex-cept I did not ask for forgiveness It was a criminalact to sign the contract with Larry Perhaps I didnot read it completely but on that little sheet ofpaper was written that you are allowed to use oursoftware and install it and run the services for thewhole Germany So that was the thing that wewere the only one the only installation as Danielhad been in Dortmund for the Unix communityAnd that was the thing that upset the DFN whothought they were the institution the only one be-ing legalized to do that job That was a total misun-derstanding of what open system means by theway Open system does not only mean to use openprotocols but also to let the things grow bottom upand not any more top down Thatrsquos why we wereconvinced we were right with our approach andLarry backed us of course If he would have drawnthe plug we would have been lost of course

But on the other end from the technical sidewe were faster developing the infrastructure thanthey could follow That was the real thing RightIf you have an isolated service somebody can saymigrate it to a different installation Move it thereand hosting is done there the next day But it be-came so complex Perhaps it was visible on one ofthe charts what was the route that the GND wassupposed to take over They refused Because theysaid they were not able to run it without any inter-

Page 8

ruption It was clear if the email service would notrun for two days the users would really give run abig protest And so we worked in parallel and thenreached the good end where we moved to the fullInternet suite in 1989

And then we thought the game is over the bat-tle is over But then DFN moved to TCP and didthe same game but then concentrated on Dortmundand really got vulgar with DENIC the registry forGermany Then the Dortmund people had to fightand I could observe what happens

A mixture of thinking having the right visionor the right way and doing technical developmentfaster than them helped us to survive

Wolff Your biggest sin was success

Jennings This is the extraordinary thing thatSteve just said is that the biggest sin was that ev-eryone who was doing this work at the time wasdoing it sort of unofficially outside the official Eu-ropean government European Union funded OpenSystems Interconnection approach to networkingand outside the approaches that were approved bythe PPTs

Let me tell you just a little bit about the PPTsBack in lsquo83 when the early EARN leased lineswere connected and thatrsquos EARN the EuropeanAcademic Research Network the European part ofBITNET that I was involved in The FranceTelecom installed their end of the line to Romeone of the major links and they issued the bill forit But they refused to connect it because of theissue called ldquopassing of third party trafficrdquo It wasagainst the law for one party to take traffic a partythe third party to take traffic from the first partyand pass it on to another party Get this right Totake first partyhellip

Karrenberg It was illegal to compete with thePPT

Jennings Thatrsquos the summary It was illegal tocompete with the PTTs in every aspect of commu-nication In fact in Ireland the law was so writtenthat technically it was illegal to speak and to usethe air between people to communicate becausethat was actually covered by the communicationsact So it was a regulatory environment that was

very hostile then to doing ad hoc things that actu-ally worked and that continued on

Jay as a historian what lessons do you drawfrom this early history of the 80s

Hauben I think the lesson to draw is to realizethat first there was a vision a deep vision fromJCR Licklider and the people in the 60s That vi-sion was of the Intergalactic network Somehowby connecting a few you were eventually going toconnect everybody But itrsquos also true if anythinggood ever happened it is because some good peo-ple worked very hard over a very long period oftime to overcome the obstacles I think we knowsomething real happened because it was so hard toget there I think each of these stories contributesto the fact that despite the obstacles people have anunderstanding that what they are doing is suffi-ciently valuable and important that they will con-tinue trying to do it The job for the historian togather up these pieces which are not very well doc-umented and put them together to show the grandflow that has come forward

The surprising thing was that when Wernertold me the China email story it was a good storybut is it exactly accurate So I looked on theInternet and in books I found that there was a to-tally different story being told that didnrsquot have aninternational component For whatever reason themain essence of the first email China story whichwas that all of this activity was international wasmissing in the telling of it To clear that up itrequired digging When I dug I found Werner wastelling it straight

I think the value of what we are doing here iswe are hearing from some of the pioneers So weare getting the clues of how to get the history rightIt is very important that the stories be known andbe told and be gathered up So I hope there will bemore panels like this one

Jennings Excellent Larry tell us a little bit aboutthe Landweber Networkshops because thosenetworkshops were key

Landweber Go back to 1982 I went to a meetingin London that Peter Kirstein had And I hadnrsquottraveled very much and I decided gee wouldnrsquot itbe nice to see more parts of the world I had been atheoretician Mostly I went to one conference a

Page 9

year or two conferences a year But now I had got-ten involved in CSNET and had switched my workto networking sometime in the 70s And it was ex-citing and by coincidence I started being in contactwith people around the world who were thinkingabout national networks sometimes the Internetsometimes like EUNET and sometimes EARNBITNET and there was no easy way for people tocommunicate So what I did was try to identify oneor two people in each country As we went alongthe number of countries expanded So that webrought them together once a year in a nice placeand spent several days exchanging ideas exchang-ing software talking about plans and it was a wayof supporting the continuing development of thenetwork Daniel was at you were at a couple ofthese right I think Dennis was I met Dennis 1984in Paris and Werner was and Steve was (were youat no maybe you werenrsquot) 1984 And so graduallyfirst it was people from North America and Eu-rope Then there were some people from LatinAmerica Then there was Kilnam Chon from Ko-rea Then there was Jun Murai from Japan Andthen there was Florencio Utreras from Chile etcetc We just graduallymdashJuha Heinaumlnen from Fin-land and gradually we expanded and it built a com-munity and that community was very important forsharing ideas Might I add one more thing

Jennings Please

Landweber OK For me all of this has a real im-portant geopolitical economic global lesson Andit is that governments have no role in decidingwhich technologies are superior to other technolo-gies Thatrsquos the lesson In the case of the OSI ac-tivity governments around the world spent billionsof dollars in an effort to build a technology thatwas poorly conceived and not well executed inplanning it They very actively objected to andworked against the Internet

Now a former student of mine was at the Eu-ropean Commission and at one point he was incharge of supporting networking at the Commis-sion I always used to make a point of thankinghim whenever I saw him because through his ef-forts he helped American industry I mean if yougo back to 1980 US industry European industryJapanese industry were on an equal par when itcame to telecommunications Governments around

the world by suppressing the creativity of their in-dustry relating to the Internet made it possible forthe major companies in the Internet field toinitially develop in the United States And I think itsignificantly for a period hurt their economiesAnd so this is something I hope will be writtensome times by historians as a lesson There is awonderful paper by Franccedilois Fluckiger fromCERN which discusses this Itrsquos about 10 yearsold

Jennings Fifteen

Landweber fifteen years old which actually talksabout the European experience Thatrsquos the lessonthe global lesson that I have from this

Jennings Steve pick that up Governmentsshouldnrsquot mandate technology Isnrsquot that what wedid in the NSF Didnrsquot we didnrsquot I go around andparticularly say it has to be TCPIP

Landweber No No

Wolff But we did that Yes But we were lucky

Landweber May I interject

Jennings You may

Landweber There was a battle The NFSNET byaccident became Internet There was a committeeand if there was a battle the physicists wantedDECNET They wanted to have connections fromtheir universities to supercomputer centers andthey wanted DECNET They didnrsquot want InternetThere were a few people like Ken Wilson the No-bel Prize winner who wanted Internet And sothere really was also within the US govern-menthellip You were there when that was happening

Jennings I fought that happening

Landweber and so it wasnrsquot obvious that Internetwas going to be the backbone of the NSFNET

Jennings But Steve

Wolff No it wasnrsquot obvious But it was a battlethat Dennis you fought and I fought as well be-

Page 10

cause I think it was clear to us where the smartpeople were It is usually a good bet to ally your-self with intelligent people and it seemed to us thatthe most intelligent people were those who wereexplaining why TCPIP were good protocols andwhat the difficulties were with DECNET and theother various protocols which were being touted atthe time

But I wanted to say something to Jay I am try-ing to remember the source of a quote which Ithink is relevant to your activities Itrsquos from a Ger-man author and I do not know the German but theEnglish translation goes something like this Thosethings and deeds which are not written down arecondemned to oblivion and given over to a sepul-cher of darkness

Larry I am very grateful to you for not havingthrown anything away because the original sourcematerial is all that we have to reconstruct the ac-tual history

Jennings Daniel can you give us a quick com-ment because it is coming towards the time Giventhat we have talked about all the difficulties all thebattles how did the Internet actually come to Eu-rope

Karrenberg Oh thatrsquos a tall order [I think] Letme deviate slightly but still have some essence intothe story I think it came many many ways Thething about one of the reasons the TCPIP proto-cols were better than others is that they allowed thenetwork to grow without any central authoritywithout any central control central network centeror whatever And so people made a link here alink there a link there Werner converted his linksto the US I think at some point to IP We did thesame At some point we were just doing the storeand forward thing I talked about earlier And thenit became economical to buy actually leased linesThen we had the leased lines it was quite easy ac-tually it was like flipping a switch to put TCPIPon it And we didnrsquot have to ask anyone in the USpermission besides the people that we were actu-ally talking to Whether we could connect to theNSFNET and things like that was a different thingBut just to have this TCPIP link was just you callthem up or send them an email actually and sayhey um tomorrow at 1000 we switch UUCP toTCPIP and PIP and that was that And then when

we had more links into different countries that be-came leased lines it was very easy to convert themas well one after another and it grew organicallyAnd somebody else said I have an island here thatuses TCPIP Letrsquos make a link and connect theislands The Internet Thatrsquos where it came fromSo thatrsquos how it came Thatrsquos the one reason whyTCPIP was better The other obviously is that itdid not concern itself so much with the applica-tions like any of the other proposals did The appli-cations are actually outside in the end systemsrather than in the network The physicists could dotheir thing over it The computer scientists coulddo their thing over it and so on

Jennings It was an internet

Zorn For me the approval by the NSF was one ofthe important things for us to maintain the emailservice to China I am sure in China that approvalwas very little known There were many other at-tempts to draw lines and links to CERN and else-where Other groups tried their best to get a con-nection to some situation they worked with Whatwould have happened in the whole interconnectednetworks with BITNET and everything around ifthe NSF would have said no

Landweber To the China link

Zorn To China Politically ldquonordquo Like you say nonothing to North Korea nothing to hellip Was it pol-icy to control every network with every exit andwhatever in China Without permission it wouldbe thrown away and the links would be cut orwhat

Jennings Let me address the question and see ifpeople agree with me I think what would havehappened it would have been done anyway Fol-lowing Steversquos maxim Yes it was nice to ask forpermission and yes it was very nice to get the per-mission But I think back then we would have doneit anyway and then asked for forgiveness And Ithink we would have gotten away with it

Wolff Do you suppose I didnrsquot think thatLaughter

Page 11

Jennings Maybe we recognized it was going tohappen anyway

Hauben I donrsquot know if anyone would have paidattention Who down the line would have actuallysaid ldquoI am not going to pass on the email messagethatrsquos come I am not going to do relay these emailmessages any morerdquo I donrsquot know which humanbeing in the chain who had invested so much of hisor her time and energy and spirit would have saidldquoOK Irsquoll be the one who doesnrsquot continue itrdquo

Landweber If there were not even the hint of thepermission and if remember we were dependingon the Defense Department

Jennings Yes

Landweber Bob Kahn had I think a very similarworld view to Steve which was things happen andhe was hoping the network would grow But if hisbosses had learned of it the people who are thereal military people they could have made us stop

Jennings They were scary people back then

Landweber There were plenty of people andthere were countries where we would not have at-tempted We would not have attempted a link toNorth Korea for example in those days

Jennings Steve

Wolff One of the consequences might have beenthat it would have taken longer for what happenedin 1994 because the precedent set by getting per-mission from the United States government for aninterconnection I think and only Madame Hu canspeak to this but I imagine it set the stage for cer-tain things to happen within China so that laterwhen the formal basically the IP connection wassought that was a very formal ceremony and it wasan actual agreement between governments And Ithink that might have taken longer to happen if thestage had not been set by the first connection

Jennings So Madame Hu do you have somecomments on the battles these people fought to getthe Internet going

Hu The description of the early days when theInternet entered China may differentiate dependingon the different events the different individuals hadbeen experiencing at that time but the main streamis quite clear that the scientific research and inter-national exchange played the role of the engineAlso we should not leave out the High EnergyPhysics Institute of CAS with their partner theSLAC in Stanford University The earlier digitalcommunication between the latter partners tookplace even for 1 year ahead of the first email sentby Wang Yunfeng and Werner Zorn and theirteams to Germany via an X25 telecommunicationlink

Looking back to 1994 at that time my feelingwas the obstacles were not in the technology Be-cause the key person of our technology team Pro-fessor Qian Hualin and others told me that theyhad full success in the test with Sprint There wereno technical obstacles Everything is ready Justthe gate is still closed somehow So I remembervery clearly when I came to Dr Neal Lane theNSF Director at that time to ask for help That wasin the early April when I was in Washington DCas a member of the China delegation attending theUS-China Combined Committee Meeting on thecollaboration in Science and Technology betweenthe two countries Dr Neal Lane immediatelymade a chance for me to talk with Stephen WolffStephen just told me ldquoDonrsquot worry No problemYou will be connected to the Internetrdquo I was notvery sure about that I asked him is it that simpleHe said yes it is simple No contract no sign nodocument the only document we had providedbefore that was the AUP (Accepted Use PolicyAnd then after a few days I got the news from mycolleagues in China that the connection is done itgoes through smoothly Everything is OK Then Ithought ldquoOh Steve Wolff is really greatrdquo Thisman had a magic stick The magic stick pointedand the gate opened Is it that simple I guess it is

Jennings On what better note to end With all the hard work and all the battles at the

end of the day it took a little magic to make this fittogether and to forge the links to China to enablethe first email twenty years ago from China to therest of the world

Ladies and Gentlemen Panel thank you verymuch indeed Applause

Page 12

Transcribed from the video athttpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3204htmlSlightly edited by some of the participants

[Editorrsquos note The following is a news report onXinhuanet based on an intervew with WernerZorn Berlin Sept 19 2007]

ldquoAcross the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the worldrdquo

by Liming Wu(English translation by Virginia Zorn)

This is the first e-mail mesage sent fromBeijing abroad on Sept 20 1987 This also meansthat the internet era knocked on the door of China

Professor Werner Zorn who was then a com-puter science professor at the University Karlsruhein Germany and who sent this first email fromChina 20 years ago told the journalists when hewas interviewed by the Xinhuanet

In September 1987 Professor Zorn visitedBeijing for a scientific conference After four yearsof preparatory work and two weeks of extremelyhard tests the joint German-Chinese team success-fully connected the Beijing Institute of ComputerApplication (ICA) and the computing centre ofUniversity Karlsruhe On Sept 20 he made thedraft of this first e-mail and together with Profes-sor Yunfeng Wang successfully sent it to one ofthe computers at the University Karlsruhe

Prof Zorn who helped China to get intointernet remembered ldquoThe first response to themail came from an American computer scienceprofessor Larry Landweber Later on there weremore and more responses from all over the worldrdquo

Professor Zorn is known as the father of theInternet in Germany Germany entered the Interneton Aug 2 1984 with the first e-mail received byProf Zorn from CSNET In 2006 Zorn wasawarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts

Prof Zorn recalled that it was out of the simplewish to facilitate the communication between thecomputer science professionals to connect thecomputer networks from both countries A letter

required at that time at least eight days andtelephone or telegraph was extremely expensive

After the first success to help China to get intothe internet Prof Zorn continued to help Chinawith its development On Nov 28 1990 Prof Zornregistered CN domain name for China and set theprimary DNS server in University Karlsruhe Thisserver was handed over to China in 1994

Zorn said he did realise the epoch-makingmeaning of the first e-mail sent from China ldquoItwas a sensational eventrdquo But what the internetmeans today was out of his imagination at thattime

Twenty years later email has become the mostpopular communication media now China with162 million internet users is the second largestinternet country after USA The internet has be-come an indispensable part of life for many Chi-nese people and the internet technology is enjoyinga dramatic boom

Twenty years have passed Prof YunfengWang who worked together with Prof Zorn to getChina on the internet passed away ten years agoProf Zorn is now 64 years old and would retiresoon What comforts him is that the Chinese Peo-ple have not forgotten him Zorn said he often gotinvitations to visit China

On Sept 18 dozens of scholars worldwidegathered at the University of Potsdam inGermany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of theChinese internet Professor Qiheng Hu presented inthe name of the Chinese internet community acrystal award to Prof Zorn On the crystal award isinscribed

We hereby present our sincere appreciationto Professor Werner Zorn for your invalu-able support to Internetrsquos early developmentin China

Page 4

Hu Not really management merely I was amongthe people who did urge the Internet to enterChina

Then in 1994 with your help Prof Zorn wemoved the cn domain name server from KarlsruheUniversity to China where it started to work onMay 1 In 1997 the CNNIC was approved by theChinese governmental authority The number ofChinese people online started to grow fast In May2001 we established the Internet Society of Chinaand to our great honor we successfully hosted the2002 ISOC Conference in Shanghai Today thenumber of Internet users in China approaches 200million

Zorn Last before I sit here modestly I want tointroduce Jay

Jay Hauben helped me to bring our story intorecognition and he plays a role of a historian hereon the panel He is at the Columbia University andedits the Amateur Computerist newsletter or maga-zine And Ronda Hauben will give a speech onNetizens this afternoon She coauthored a bookabout netizens

Jay is the most most accurate writer andresearcher I ever met For whatever I said he an-swered ldquoProve itrdquo So I had to set up all the con-tacts through my old Chinese friends and get mate-rial out of my archives And he pushed and pushedand pushed me And finally he believed what Isaid But I had to prove everything And now onthe panel his role will be to raise a finger and sayall what you do should be written down otherwiseit will be forgotten That is also maybe one of thetopics of our discussion to keep that in mind andon paper not only on CDs

Ok So far my introduction so you will knowwhy these people are all my companions in differ-ent stages of what I did I am really happy that youall came here Without any one of you we wouldnot have completed that route So I really feelhappy now to have everybody here that you saw inmy slides Everyone is here exact perhaps DaveFarber but he was a little bit further from me NowI want to express my thanks again that you havecome so we can have a small but very high levelInternet summit Would you agree

One more question Most of us met last at theInternet Society yearly conference in Washington

in 2002 I think that was the last INET conferenceWhy wasnrsquot the tradition continued

Landweber I think that their time had passed

Zorn Thatrsquos an interesting point Ok Now I stop with the introductions and sit

here And Dennis it is your turn now

Jennings Werner thank you very much indeedAnd thank you for managing all those introduc-tions which saved me a tremendous amount ofwork as the moderator of this panel

First of all my apologies I speak neither Ger-man nor Chinese So I will speak in English andIrsquoll do my best to be understood

It occurs to me as I look around and as I talkto people young and indeed old that now use theInternet that most people just simply assume theInternet is there It works All the things that weuse that they use day to day has always been thereas far as they are concerned And they have noconception of the background or the history or thestruggles that went into creating this thing calledthe Internet Thatrsquos the first question I would liketo put to each member of the panel What nowseems so simple and so obvious Larry was it al-ways like this or were there was it different Whatare the war stories behind the story

Landweber If we go back to the 1980s early1980s there was a research project that DARPA4

had supported that developed TCPIP But therewas no Internet In the early 1980s the USDefense Department and the National ScienceFoundation were interested in exploring buildingthe Internet On the other hand there was an inter-national standards effort called OSI for Open Sys-tems Interconnection and officially every govern-ment in the world except perhaps Finland sup-ported the OSI effort Hundreds of millions per-haps billions of dollars were spent on the develop-ment of a protocol suite that would become inter-national standards And most countries of theworld the national science foundations would notput money into internet development including inGermany and also the United States except for theDefense Department NSF and maybe the Depart-ment of Energy There was very little support forthe Internet Companies like IBM and Digital

Page 5

Equipment were actively not supportive of theInternet So in fact there was a major struggle toget the Internet supported Internet developmentand the building of testbeds initially

Should I keep going for a few minutes

Jennings Yes please

Landweber So here we are in the 1980s and theInternet is really a stepchild and not very far alongWell myself Dave Farber a couple of others pro-posed CSNET and CSNET was funded by the Na-5

tional Science Foundation Soon after I went toBob Kahn who was the DARPA person (of Cerfand Kahn who first conceived of the TCPIP pro-tocol) Bob gave us permission to set up interna-tional gateways so that email and other connec-tions from other parts of the world would allowdata to flow into the US networks including theARPANET and other Internet connected networksOne of the very first connections we made was toGermany I never throw anything out so I haveearly email from 1983 that I think is the first emailI got from you Werner asking about a connectionto Germany from CSNET And we approved thegateway and worked on it Now there were prob-lems Werner has talked about the technical prob-lems I mean everything was flakey The softwarewe had for supporting Internet protocols was notrobust The network connections were not robustAs you heard he had to tie together a satellite linkand X25 links and then go across to the UnitedStates and use this PMDF which was mail relaysoftware So it was not trivial technically

But I guess as hard maybe harder were thepolitical problems So in the United States Ste-phen Wolff gave us permission to have the gate-way to China in 1987 What was not mentionedwas the next day he told us permission wasrevoked It was the White House that had inter-vened and told Steve that permission was not to begiven And Steve had this wonderful philosophywhich helped make the NSFNET so successfulWhich was you donrsquot ask permission in advanceYou ask forgiveness afterwards And so he I thinkmaybe winked at us and we also decided well itrsquosjust the White House and wersquore academics TheWhite House we can ignore them So we actuallyignored the order to turn off the connection to

China and that was something that I think was veryimportant

But then there also were political problems thatwe experienced with Germany which maybeWerner is not completely familiar with I was get-ting messages from DFN the German NationalNetwork DFN was 100 percent behind the OSIeffort Very very large amounts of money werebeing spent by DFN with German industry anduniversities to develop the OSI protocols Some-time around 1986 or 7 I started getting messagesfrom DFN people asking us to disconnect the gate-way to Karlsruhe and connect directly to DFN Myview is that you support the people who have donethe work and who are the good people And in factthe workshops that I organized each year were setup to bring the visionaries from each countrytogether the people who really were beginning toinvestigate the Internet In Germany that wasWerner Zorn And so CSNET refused to do thedisconnection I never throw anything out so Iwent and read all the emails which were asking meto do that So there were political problems alsoWe learned a number of lessons from this activity

Jennings Daniel can you pick that up becausecertainly I remember the protocol wars One of theastonishing things was not just the amount ofmoney that Larry has referred to but the vicious-ness the interpersonal fighting that went on Thepeople were trying actively to disrupt non OSI ac-tively Daniel do you want to talk a little bit aboutthat

Karrenberg OK Irsquoll talk a little about that but Iwonrsquot go into the fighting part But first just to ex-plain a little bit the question about ldquoWas itobviousrdquo No it was not obvious I was in a placeI was a student an undergraduate student inDortmund The only thing we wanted was emailWe didnrsquot have any sort of political agenda orwhatever no vision We just wanted email We didnot have any money We still wanted email Andwe found some allies in the Computer Science de-partment there They had some visiting professorswho actually said we will only come to Dortmundif there is email This was in 1982 I believe lsquo81lsquo82 timeframe And we were also running Unix atthe time which wasnrsquot quite so popular and wewere only allowed to do that at night During the

Page 6

daytime the computers were used for serious pur-poses In the evenings we could do Unix And atthat time we heard about this Unix network thisUUCP network that was going on We had all thesoftware so we didnrsquot have that problem But howdo you connect How do you connect internation-ally The only way we could do that was throughthe telephone very much like Wernerrsquos first at-tempt to do the China thing

We had a little bit of an easier task because weonly had to connect to the next country the Neth-erlands And we did that We found some modemsand connected to them and got our email and ournet use

At some point the phone bills were so signifi-cant at the departmental level and questions wereasked And we explained and that was fine Thenother places in Germany running Unix also wantedto connect and they connected to us This waspurely lsquostore and forwardrsquo Your email mail wouldtake a day to get somewhere because it had to bewritten on one computer stored there They had tomake a telephone connection stored on the nextcomputer store and forward We could have emailconversations with like-minded people in the USfor instance that would be a message a day Butthat was tremendous I mean compared to postalmail and so forth That was fine

At some point this grew and I remember veryvividly how we were trying to find ways of actu-ally keeping it going financially It was very verydifficult in those times And if you are sitting in aninstitute like this itrsquos hard to imagine but twentyyears ago more than 20 years ago universitieswere basically state institutions run by state rulesrun by national rules and run by civil servants Itwas incredibly hard to take money into thoseplaces especially if it wasnrsquot like for big projectsit was just to pay the phone bill And so we had toovercome that kind of thing And the next thingwas we had to break the law because at some pointwe wanted faster speed and automatic dialing sothat when the international phone rates becamecheaper I think it was 1000pm or 1100pm at thetime we would not have to go into the computerroom and actually dial Amsterdam So we wantedan autodialer and we wanted quicker modems Andit was actually on the statute books a crime or anoffence Irsquom not sure The title of the law the Ger-man title of the law is Fernmeldeanlagengesetz I

donrsquot know whether it still exists But it was acriminal offense to connect anything that was notapproved by the state run PTT to the telephonenetwork And we were doing like ok do we reallywant this There is approved equipment but it isway beyond our budget So we went to our direc-tor Dr Rudolf Pater who is one of the other un-sung heroes of this and said we have this problemHe said ldquoya we donrsquot have the budgetrdquo We saidwe have this other solution We know it works Weknow it wonrsquot break the phone system They use itin the Netherlands Can we use that And he saidldquoI donrsquot want to know about itrdquo So we said wewant to buy it and itrsquos not that cheap It was likeabout what today would be 2 or 3 personalcomputers worth of money And we said we havealready talked to some of the visiting professorsand some of the other academics and we will justall chip in and we will buy it He said ldquoNa let meseerdquo And then sort of magically a week later wewere asked what is the specification of this stuffWhere can we buy it And it was actually boughtwith public money And I never know what it wassupposed to be that we ordered there That kind ofstuff And that kind of stuff is really the resistancethat you have to overcome And then the criminaloffence too And all these kinds of things And ofcourse we also had this experience when this grewand had like 50 60 70 80 places connected inGermany we faced resistance like ldquoYou are notdoing the right thing You are just making thingswork We want to do the politically correct thingrdquoAnd we were a bit more resilient to the kind of ap-proach that Larry just related because we were ac-tually funded by a big number of participants andwe werenrsquot in that sense part of the academic es-tablishment But it was quite clear that there wastremendous pressure put on the university to actu-ally either stop this altogether or play it down DrPater was one of the people who actually resistedthat

Can I do one more minute

Jennings Yes please

Karrenberg One day we have this meeting everyweek to see how things are going with the net-works thing and he goes I got a letter from thedean of the department He commends us on ourgood work facilitating the visiting professors and

Page 7

all that kind of stuff And he is really happy withwhat we are doing This is fine

At the same time I was in another function Iwas a student representative in university govern-ment Two weeks later in my pile of papers thissame letter appears And at the end there is a para-graph that says ldquoand by the way you are not sup-posed to become the German central hub of thisrdquoSo I see this and go hmmm and take the letter andgo to Dr Paterrsquos office and say ldquoHey did youmiss the last paragraphrdquo And he goes like ldquoOnetwo three hellip Daniel I chose to ignore thatrdquo

Jennings Steve tell us about what you chose toignore

Wolff It was not as much a matter of ignoringthings as trying to make it obvious to the right peo-ple You see by the time I got to the NSF afterDennis had broken the soil the notion of theInternet was obvious to computer scientistsbecause they had CSNET They knew it workedThey knew what it would do It was obvious touniversity IT departments because they hadBITNET They knew what it could do And it wasobvious to computational physicists because theyhad MFENET and NSFNET and they knew what itcould do But in total thatrsquos a very small popula-tion And in fact people who ran much of theNSFNET the regional networks were based instate run universities and many of them had bettheir careers and their jobs on making the networkwork So part of my job was to make it obvious tothe people who gave them money So I spent agreat deal of time talking to associations of stategovernors to a group of comptrollers of states tell-ing them that the money was not being badly sentSo most of my job was actually marketing tryingto convince people that this was a good thing andthe money was not being wasted

It seems as though each consistency had itsown vision of what the network was going to doIrsquom not sure what computer scientists thoughtabout it It was very clear what IT professionalswanted from it And it was perfectly obvious whatcomputational physicists wanted out of the net-work And they havenrsquot changed in twenty yearsThey wanted more faster But what is clear to menow is that the essential thing is that everyone hasa vision The hardest part of my job was trying to

communicate that vision to sufficiently many com-munities so it would catch hold somewhere

Jennings Werner letrsquos come back to you Tell usa little bit of the battle in Germany

Zorn Larry told something about the politicalpressure in the lsquo80s When we started with the ser-vices we expected that everybody would be happyin the German networking community But espe-cially in the German Research Network the DFNjust the opposite was the case I asked myselfwhat what is going on here We succeeded in ourproject but then those who gave the money or hasthe job to do that refused to accept that That wasthe signal that something is wrong in the system Iwas convinced that if their position is wrong oursmust be better or right So it was really a thingbetween right and wrong And of course we werefighting for our way Steversquos philosophy Larrytold us was donrsquot ask for permission before butask for forgiveness after It was the same thing ex-cept I did not ask for forgiveness It was a criminalact to sign the contract with Larry Perhaps I didnot read it completely but on that little sheet ofpaper was written that you are allowed to use oursoftware and install it and run the services for thewhole Germany So that was the thing that wewere the only one the only installation as Danielhad been in Dortmund for the Unix communityAnd that was the thing that upset the DFN whothought they were the institution the only one be-ing legalized to do that job That was a total misun-derstanding of what open system means by theway Open system does not only mean to use openprotocols but also to let the things grow bottom upand not any more top down Thatrsquos why we wereconvinced we were right with our approach andLarry backed us of course If he would have drawnthe plug we would have been lost of course

But on the other end from the technical sidewe were faster developing the infrastructure thanthey could follow That was the real thing RightIf you have an isolated service somebody can saymigrate it to a different installation Move it thereand hosting is done there the next day But it be-came so complex Perhaps it was visible on one ofthe charts what was the route that the GND wassupposed to take over They refused Because theysaid they were not able to run it without any inter-

Page 8

ruption It was clear if the email service would notrun for two days the users would really give run abig protest And so we worked in parallel and thenreached the good end where we moved to the fullInternet suite in 1989

And then we thought the game is over the bat-tle is over But then DFN moved to TCP and didthe same game but then concentrated on Dortmundand really got vulgar with DENIC the registry forGermany Then the Dortmund people had to fightand I could observe what happens

A mixture of thinking having the right visionor the right way and doing technical developmentfaster than them helped us to survive

Wolff Your biggest sin was success

Jennings This is the extraordinary thing thatSteve just said is that the biggest sin was that ev-eryone who was doing this work at the time wasdoing it sort of unofficially outside the official Eu-ropean government European Union funded OpenSystems Interconnection approach to networkingand outside the approaches that were approved bythe PPTs

Let me tell you just a little bit about the PPTsBack in lsquo83 when the early EARN leased lineswere connected and thatrsquos EARN the EuropeanAcademic Research Network the European part ofBITNET that I was involved in The FranceTelecom installed their end of the line to Romeone of the major links and they issued the bill forit But they refused to connect it because of theissue called ldquopassing of third party trafficrdquo It wasagainst the law for one party to take traffic a partythe third party to take traffic from the first partyand pass it on to another party Get this right Totake first partyhellip

Karrenberg It was illegal to compete with thePPT

Jennings Thatrsquos the summary It was illegal tocompete with the PTTs in every aspect of commu-nication In fact in Ireland the law was so writtenthat technically it was illegal to speak and to usethe air between people to communicate becausethat was actually covered by the communicationsact So it was a regulatory environment that was

very hostile then to doing ad hoc things that actu-ally worked and that continued on

Jay as a historian what lessons do you drawfrom this early history of the 80s

Hauben I think the lesson to draw is to realizethat first there was a vision a deep vision fromJCR Licklider and the people in the 60s That vi-sion was of the Intergalactic network Somehowby connecting a few you were eventually going toconnect everybody But itrsquos also true if anythinggood ever happened it is because some good peo-ple worked very hard over a very long period oftime to overcome the obstacles I think we knowsomething real happened because it was so hard toget there I think each of these stories contributesto the fact that despite the obstacles people have anunderstanding that what they are doing is suffi-ciently valuable and important that they will con-tinue trying to do it The job for the historian togather up these pieces which are not very well doc-umented and put them together to show the grandflow that has come forward

The surprising thing was that when Wernertold me the China email story it was a good storybut is it exactly accurate So I looked on theInternet and in books I found that there was a to-tally different story being told that didnrsquot have aninternational component For whatever reason themain essence of the first email China story whichwas that all of this activity was international wasmissing in the telling of it To clear that up itrequired digging When I dug I found Werner wastelling it straight

I think the value of what we are doing here iswe are hearing from some of the pioneers So weare getting the clues of how to get the history rightIt is very important that the stories be known andbe told and be gathered up So I hope there will bemore panels like this one

Jennings Excellent Larry tell us a little bit aboutthe Landweber Networkshops because thosenetworkshops were key

Landweber Go back to 1982 I went to a meetingin London that Peter Kirstein had And I hadnrsquottraveled very much and I decided gee wouldnrsquot itbe nice to see more parts of the world I had been atheoretician Mostly I went to one conference a

Page 9

year or two conferences a year But now I had got-ten involved in CSNET and had switched my workto networking sometime in the 70s And it was ex-citing and by coincidence I started being in contactwith people around the world who were thinkingabout national networks sometimes the Internetsometimes like EUNET and sometimes EARNBITNET and there was no easy way for people tocommunicate So what I did was try to identify oneor two people in each country As we went alongthe number of countries expanded So that webrought them together once a year in a nice placeand spent several days exchanging ideas exchang-ing software talking about plans and it was a wayof supporting the continuing development of thenetwork Daniel was at you were at a couple ofthese right I think Dennis was I met Dennis 1984in Paris and Werner was and Steve was (were youat no maybe you werenrsquot) 1984 And so graduallyfirst it was people from North America and Eu-rope Then there were some people from LatinAmerica Then there was Kilnam Chon from Ko-rea Then there was Jun Murai from Japan Andthen there was Florencio Utreras from Chile etcetc We just graduallymdashJuha Heinaumlnen from Fin-land and gradually we expanded and it built a com-munity and that community was very important forsharing ideas Might I add one more thing

Jennings Please

Landweber OK For me all of this has a real im-portant geopolitical economic global lesson Andit is that governments have no role in decidingwhich technologies are superior to other technolo-gies Thatrsquos the lesson In the case of the OSI ac-tivity governments around the world spent billionsof dollars in an effort to build a technology thatwas poorly conceived and not well executed inplanning it They very actively objected to andworked against the Internet

Now a former student of mine was at the Eu-ropean Commission and at one point he was incharge of supporting networking at the Commis-sion I always used to make a point of thankinghim whenever I saw him because through his ef-forts he helped American industry I mean if yougo back to 1980 US industry European industryJapanese industry were on an equal par when itcame to telecommunications Governments around

the world by suppressing the creativity of their in-dustry relating to the Internet made it possible forthe major companies in the Internet field toinitially develop in the United States And I think itsignificantly for a period hurt their economiesAnd so this is something I hope will be writtensome times by historians as a lesson There is awonderful paper by Franccedilois Fluckiger fromCERN which discusses this Itrsquos about 10 yearsold

Jennings Fifteen

Landweber fifteen years old which actually talksabout the European experience Thatrsquos the lessonthe global lesson that I have from this

Jennings Steve pick that up Governmentsshouldnrsquot mandate technology Isnrsquot that what wedid in the NSF Didnrsquot we didnrsquot I go around andparticularly say it has to be TCPIP

Landweber No No

Wolff But we did that Yes But we were lucky

Landweber May I interject

Jennings You may

Landweber There was a battle The NFSNET byaccident became Internet There was a committeeand if there was a battle the physicists wantedDECNET They wanted to have connections fromtheir universities to supercomputer centers andthey wanted DECNET They didnrsquot want InternetThere were a few people like Ken Wilson the No-bel Prize winner who wanted Internet And sothere really was also within the US govern-menthellip You were there when that was happening

Jennings I fought that happening

Landweber and so it wasnrsquot obvious that Internetwas going to be the backbone of the NSFNET

Jennings But Steve

Wolff No it wasnrsquot obvious But it was a battlethat Dennis you fought and I fought as well be-

Page 10

cause I think it was clear to us where the smartpeople were It is usually a good bet to ally your-self with intelligent people and it seemed to us thatthe most intelligent people were those who wereexplaining why TCPIP were good protocols andwhat the difficulties were with DECNET and theother various protocols which were being touted atthe time

But I wanted to say something to Jay I am try-ing to remember the source of a quote which Ithink is relevant to your activities Itrsquos from a Ger-man author and I do not know the German but theEnglish translation goes something like this Thosethings and deeds which are not written down arecondemned to oblivion and given over to a sepul-cher of darkness

Larry I am very grateful to you for not havingthrown anything away because the original sourcematerial is all that we have to reconstruct the ac-tual history

Jennings Daniel can you give us a quick com-ment because it is coming towards the time Giventhat we have talked about all the difficulties all thebattles how did the Internet actually come to Eu-rope

Karrenberg Oh thatrsquos a tall order [I think] Letme deviate slightly but still have some essence intothe story I think it came many many ways Thething about one of the reasons the TCPIP proto-cols were better than others is that they allowed thenetwork to grow without any central authoritywithout any central control central network centeror whatever And so people made a link here alink there a link there Werner converted his linksto the US I think at some point to IP We did thesame At some point we were just doing the storeand forward thing I talked about earlier And thenit became economical to buy actually leased linesThen we had the leased lines it was quite easy ac-tually it was like flipping a switch to put TCPIPon it And we didnrsquot have to ask anyone in the USpermission besides the people that we were actu-ally talking to Whether we could connect to theNSFNET and things like that was a different thingBut just to have this TCPIP link was just you callthem up or send them an email actually and sayhey um tomorrow at 1000 we switch UUCP toTCPIP and PIP and that was that And then when

we had more links into different countries that be-came leased lines it was very easy to convert themas well one after another and it grew organicallyAnd somebody else said I have an island here thatuses TCPIP Letrsquos make a link and connect theislands The Internet Thatrsquos where it came fromSo thatrsquos how it came Thatrsquos the one reason whyTCPIP was better The other obviously is that itdid not concern itself so much with the applica-tions like any of the other proposals did The appli-cations are actually outside in the end systemsrather than in the network The physicists could dotheir thing over it The computer scientists coulddo their thing over it and so on

Jennings It was an internet

Zorn For me the approval by the NSF was one ofthe important things for us to maintain the emailservice to China I am sure in China that approvalwas very little known There were many other at-tempts to draw lines and links to CERN and else-where Other groups tried their best to get a con-nection to some situation they worked with Whatwould have happened in the whole interconnectednetworks with BITNET and everything around ifthe NSF would have said no

Landweber To the China link

Zorn To China Politically ldquonordquo Like you say nonothing to North Korea nothing to hellip Was it pol-icy to control every network with every exit andwhatever in China Without permission it wouldbe thrown away and the links would be cut orwhat

Jennings Let me address the question and see ifpeople agree with me I think what would havehappened it would have been done anyway Fol-lowing Steversquos maxim Yes it was nice to ask forpermission and yes it was very nice to get the per-mission But I think back then we would have doneit anyway and then asked for forgiveness And Ithink we would have gotten away with it

Wolff Do you suppose I didnrsquot think thatLaughter

Page 11

Jennings Maybe we recognized it was going tohappen anyway

Hauben I donrsquot know if anyone would have paidattention Who down the line would have actuallysaid ldquoI am not going to pass on the email messagethatrsquos come I am not going to do relay these emailmessages any morerdquo I donrsquot know which humanbeing in the chain who had invested so much of hisor her time and energy and spirit would have saidldquoOK Irsquoll be the one who doesnrsquot continue itrdquo

Landweber If there were not even the hint of thepermission and if remember we were dependingon the Defense Department

Jennings Yes

Landweber Bob Kahn had I think a very similarworld view to Steve which was things happen andhe was hoping the network would grow But if hisbosses had learned of it the people who are thereal military people they could have made us stop

Jennings They were scary people back then

Landweber There were plenty of people andthere were countries where we would not have at-tempted We would not have attempted a link toNorth Korea for example in those days

Jennings Steve

Wolff One of the consequences might have beenthat it would have taken longer for what happenedin 1994 because the precedent set by getting per-mission from the United States government for aninterconnection I think and only Madame Hu canspeak to this but I imagine it set the stage for cer-tain things to happen within China so that laterwhen the formal basically the IP connection wassought that was a very formal ceremony and it wasan actual agreement between governments And Ithink that might have taken longer to happen if thestage had not been set by the first connection

Jennings So Madame Hu do you have somecomments on the battles these people fought to getthe Internet going

Hu The description of the early days when theInternet entered China may differentiate dependingon the different events the different individuals hadbeen experiencing at that time but the main streamis quite clear that the scientific research and inter-national exchange played the role of the engineAlso we should not leave out the High EnergyPhysics Institute of CAS with their partner theSLAC in Stanford University The earlier digitalcommunication between the latter partners tookplace even for 1 year ahead of the first email sentby Wang Yunfeng and Werner Zorn and theirteams to Germany via an X25 telecommunicationlink

Looking back to 1994 at that time my feelingwas the obstacles were not in the technology Be-cause the key person of our technology team Pro-fessor Qian Hualin and others told me that theyhad full success in the test with Sprint There wereno technical obstacles Everything is ready Justthe gate is still closed somehow So I remembervery clearly when I came to Dr Neal Lane theNSF Director at that time to ask for help That wasin the early April when I was in Washington DCas a member of the China delegation attending theUS-China Combined Committee Meeting on thecollaboration in Science and Technology betweenthe two countries Dr Neal Lane immediatelymade a chance for me to talk with Stephen WolffStephen just told me ldquoDonrsquot worry No problemYou will be connected to the Internetrdquo I was notvery sure about that I asked him is it that simpleHe said yes it is simple No contract no sign nodocument the only document we had providedbefore that was the AUP (Accepted Use PolicyAnd then after a few days I got the news from mycolleagues in China that the connection is done itgoes through smoothly Everything is OK Then Ithought ldquoOh Steve Wolff is really greatrdquo Thisman had a magic stick The magic stick pointedand the gate opened Is it that simple I guess it is

Jennings On what better note to end With all the hard work and all the battles at the

end of the day it took a little magic to make this fittogether and to forge the links to China to enablethe first email twenty years ago from China to therest of the world

Ladies and Gentlemen Panel thank you verymuch indeed Applause

Page 12

Transcribed from the video athttpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3204htmlSlightly edited by some of the participants

[Editorrsquos note The following is a news report onXinhuanet based on an intervew with WernerZorn Berlin Sept 19 2007]

ldquoAcross the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the worldrdquo

by Liming Wu(English translation by Virginia Zorn)

This is the first e-mail mesage sent fromBeijing abroad on Sept 20 1987 This also meansthat the internet era knocked on the door of China

Professor Werner Zorn who was then a com-puter science professor at the University Karlsruhein Germany and who sent this first email fromChina 20 years ago told the journalists when hewas interviewed by the Xinhuanet

In September 1987 Professor Zorn visitedBeijing for a scientific conference After four yearsof preparatory work and two weeks of extremelyhard tests the joint German-Chinese team success-fully connected the Beijing Institute of ComputerApplication (ICA) and the computing centre ofUniversity Karlsruhe On Sept 20 he made thedraft of this first e-mail and together with Profes-sor Yunfeng Wang successfully sent it to one ofthe computers at the University Karlsruhe

Prof Zorn who helped China to get intointernet remembered ldquoThe first response to themail came from an American computer scienceprofessor Larry Landweber Later on there weremore and more responses from all over the worldrdquo

Professor Zorn is known as the father of theInternet in Germany Germany entered the Interneton Aug 2 1984 with the first e-mail received byProf Zorn from CSNET In 2006 Zorn wasawarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts

Prof Zorn recalled that it was out of the simplewish to facilitate the communication between thecomputer science professionals to connect thecomputer networks from both countries A letter

required at that time at least eight days andtelephone or telegraph was extremely expensive

After the first success to help China to get intothe internet Prof Zorn continued to help Chinawith its development On Nov 28 1990 Prof Zornregistered CN domain name for China and set theprimary DNS server in University Karlsruhe Thisserver was handed over to China in 1994

Zorn said he did realise the epoch-makingmeaning of the first e-mail sent from China ldquoItwas a sensational eventrdquo But what the internetmeans today was out of his imagination at thattime

Twenty years later email has become the mostpopular communication media now China with162 million internet users is the second largestinternet country after USA The internet has be-come an indispensable part of life for many Chi-nese people and the internet technology is enjoyinga dramatic boom

Twenty years have passed Prof YunfengWang who worked together with Prof Zorn to getChina on the internet passed away ten years agoProf Zorn is now 64 years old and would retiresoon What comforts him is that the Chinese Peo-ple have not forgotten him Zorn said he often gotinvitations to visit China

On Sept 18 dozens of scholars worldwidegathered at the University of Potsdam inGermany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of theChinese internet Professor Qiheng Hu presented inthe name of the Chinese internet community acrystal award to Prof Zorn On the crystal award isinscribed

We hereby present our sincere appreciationto Professor Werner Zorn for your invalu-able support to Internetrsquos early developmentin China

Page 5

Equipment were actively not supportive of theInternet So in fact there was a major struggle toget the Internet supported Internet developmentand the building of testbeds initially

Should I keep going for a few minutes

Jennings Yes please

Landweber So here we are in the 1980s and theInternet is really a stepchild and not very far alongWell myself Dave Farber a couple of others pro-posed CSNET and CSNET was funded by the Na-5

tional Science Foundation Soon after I went toBob Kahn who was the DARPA person (of Cerfand Kahn who first conceived of the TCPIP pro-tocol) Bob gave us permission to set up interna-tional gateways so that email and other connec-tions from other parts of the world would allowdata to flow into the US networks including theARPANET and other Internet connected networksOne of the very first connections we made was toGermany I never throw anything out so I haveearly email from 1983 that I think is the first emailI got from you Werner asking about a connectionto Germany from CSNET And we approved thegateway and worked on it Now there were prob-lems Werner has talked about the technical prob-lems I mean everything was flakey The softwarewe had for supporting Internet protocols was notrobust The network connections were not robustAs you heard he had to tie together a satellite linkand X25 links and then go across to the UnitedStates and use this PMDF which was mail relaysoftware So it was not trivial technically

But I guess as hard maybe harder were thepolitical problems So in the United States Ste-phen Wolff gave us permission to have the gate-way to China in 1987 What was not mentionedwas the next day he told us permission wasrevoked It was the White House that had inter-vened and told Steve that permission was not to begiven And Steve had this wonderful philosophywhich helped make the NSFNET so successfulWhich was you donrsquot ask permission in advanceYou ask forgiveness afterwards And so he I thinkmaybe winked at us and we also decided well itrsquosjust the White House and wersquore academics TheWhite House we can ignore them So we actuallyignored the order to turn off the connection to

China and that was something that I think was veryimportant

But then there also were political problems thatwe experienced with Germany which maybeWerner is not completely familiar with I was get-ting messages from DFN the German NationalNetwork DFN was 100 percent behind the OSIeffort Very very large amounts of money werebeing spent by DFN with German industry anduniversities to develop the OSI protocols Some-time around 1986 or 7 I started getting messagesfrom DFN people asking us to disconnect the gate-way to Karlsruhe and connect directly to DFN Myview is that you support the people who have donethe work and who are the good people And in factthe workshops that I organized each year were setup to bring the visionaries from each countrytogether the people who really were beginning toinvestigate the Internet In Germany that wasWerner Zorn And so CSNET refused to do thedisconnection I never throw anything out so Iwent and read all the emails which were asking meto do that So there were political problems alsoWe learned a number of lessons from this activity

Jennings Daniel can you pick that up becausecertainly I remember the protocol wars One of theastonishing things was not just the amount ofmoney that Larry has referred to but the vicious-ness the interpersonal fighting that went on Thepeople were trying actively to disrupt non OSI ac-tively Daniel do you want to talk a little bit aboutthat

Karrenberg OK Irsquoll talk a little about that but Iwonrsquot go into the fighting part But first just to ex-plain a little bit the question about ldquoWas itobviousrdquo No it was not obvious I was in a placeI was a student an undergraduate student inDortmund The only thing we wanted was emailWe didnrsquot have any sort of political agenda orwhatever no vision We just wanted email We didnot have any money We still wanted email Andwe found some allies in the Computer Science de-partment there They had some visiting professorswho actually said we will only come to Dortmundif there is email This was in 1982 I believe lsquo81lsquo82 timeframe And we were also running Unix atthe time which wasnrsquot quite so popular and wewere only allowed to do that at night During the

Page 6

daytime the computers were used for serious pur-poses In the evenings we could do Unix And atthat time we heard about this Unix network thisUUCP network that was going on We had all thesoftware so we didnrsquot have that problem But howdo you connect How do you connect internation-ally The only way we could do that was throughthe telephone very much like Wernerrsquos first at-tempt to do the China thing

We had a little bit of an easier task because weonly had to connect to the next country the Neth-erlands And we did that We found some modemsand connected to them and got our email and ournet use

At some point the phone bills were so signifi-cant at the departmental level and questions wereasked And we explained and that was fine Thenother places in Germany running Unix also wantedto connect and they connected to us This waspurely lsquostore and forwardrsquo Your email mail wouldtake a day to get somewhere because it had to bewritten on one computer stored there They had tomake a telephone connection stored on the nextcomputer store and forward We could have emailconversations with like-minded people in the USfor instance that would be a message a day Butthat was tremendous I mean compared to postalmail and so forth That was fine

At some point this grew and I remember veryvividly how we were trying to find ways of actu-ally keeping it going financially It was very verydifficult in those times And if you are sitting in aninstitute like this itrsquos hard to imagine but twentyyears ago more than 20 years ago universitieswere basically state institutions run by state rulesrun by national rules and run by civil servants Itwas incredibly hard to take money into thoseplaces especially if it wasnrsquot like for big projectsit was just to pay the phone bill And so we had toovercome that kind of thing And the next thingwas we had to break the law because at some pointwe wanted faster speed and automatic dialing sothat when the international phone rates becamecheaper I think it was 1000pm or 1100pm at thetime we would not have to go into the computerroom and actually dial Amsterdam So we wantedan autodialer and we wanted quicker modems Andit was actually on the statute books a crime or anoffence Irsquom not sure The title of the law the Ger-man title of the law is Fernmeldeanlagengesetz I

donrsquot know whether it still exists But it was acriminal offense to connect anything that was notapproved by the state run PTT to the telephonenetwork And we were doing like ok do we reallywant this There is approved equipment but it isway beyond our budget So we went to our direc-tor Dr Rudolf Pater who is one of the other un-sung heroes of this and said we have this problemHe said ldquoya we donrsquot have the budgetrdquo We saidwe have this other solution We know it works Weknow it wonrsquot break the phone system They use itin the Netherlands Can we use that And he saidldquoI donrsquot want to know about itrdquo So we said wewant to buy it and itrsquos not that cheap It was likeabout what today would be 2 or 3 personalcomputers worth of money And we said we havealready talked to some of the visiting professorsand some of the other academics and we will justall chip in and we will buy it He said ldquoNa let meseerdquo And then sort of magically a week later wewere asked what is the specification of this stuffWhere can we buy it And it was actually boughtwith public money And I never know what it wassupposed to be that we ordered there That kind ofstuff And that kind of stuff is really the resistancethat you have to overcome And then the criminaloffence too And all these kinds of things And ofcourse we also had this experience when this grewand had like 50 60 70 80 places connected inGermany we faced resistance like ldquoYou are notdoing the right thing You are just making thingswork We want to do the politically correct thingrdquoAnd we were a bit more resilient to the kind of ap-proach that Larry just related because we were ac-tually funded by a big number of participants andwe werenrsquot in that sense part of the academic es-tablishment But it was quite clear that there wastremendous pressure put on the university to actu-ally either stop this altogether or play it down DrPater was one of the people who actually resistedthat

Can I do one more minute

Jennings Yes please

Karrenberg One day we have this meeting everyweek to see how things are going with the net-works thing and he goes I got a letter from thedean of the department He commends us on ourgood work facilitating the visiting professors and

Page 7

all that kind of stuff And he is really happy withwhat we are doing This is fine

At the same time I was in another function Iwas a student representative in university govern-ment Two weeks later in my pile of papers thissame letter appears And at the end there is a para-graph that says ldquoand by the way you are not sup-posed to become the German central hub of thisrdquoSo I see this and go hmmm and take the letter andgo to Dr Paterrsquos office and say ldquoHey did youmiss the last paragraphrdquo And he goes like ldquoOnetwo three hellip Daniel I chose to ignore thatrdquo

Jennings Steve tell us about what you chose toignore

Wolff It was not as much a matter of ignoringthings as trying to make it obvious to the right peo-ple You see by the time I got to the NSF afterDennis had broken the soil the notion of theInternet was obvious to computer scientistsbecause they had CSNET They knew it workedThey knew what it would do It was obvious touniversity IT departments because they hadBITNET They knew what it could do And it wasobvious to computational physicists because theyhad MFENET and NSFNET and they knew what itcould do But in total thatrsquos a very small popula-tion And in fact people who ran much of theNSFNET the regional networks were based instate run universities and many of them had bettheir careers and their jobs on making the networkwork So part of my job was to make it obvious tothe people who gave them money So I spent agreat deal of time talking to associations of stategovernors to a group of comptrollers of states tell-ing them that the money was not being badly sentSo most of my job was actually marketing tryingto convince people that this was a good thing andthe money was not being wasted

It seems as though each consistency had itsown vision of what the network was going to doIrsquom not sure what computer scientists thoughtabout it It was very clear what IT professionalswanted from it And it was perfectly obvious whatcomputational physicists wanted out of the net-work And they havenrsquot changed in twenty yearsThey wanted more faster But what is clear to menow is that the essential thing is that everyone hasa vision The hardest part of my job was trying to

communicate that vision to sufficiently many com-munities so it would catch hold somewhere

Jennings Werner letrsquos come back to you Tell usa little bit of the battle in Germany

Zorn Larry told something about the politicalpressure in the lsquo80s When we started with the ser-vices we expected that everybody would be happyin the German networking community But espe-cially in the German Research Network the DFNjust the opposite was the case I asked myselfwhat what is going on here We succeeded in ourproject but then those who gave the money or hasthe job to do that refused to accept that That wasthe signal that something is wrong in the system Iwas convinced that if their position is wrong oursmust be better or right So it was really a thingbetween right and wrong And of course we werefighting for our way Steversquos philosophy Larrytold us was donrsquot ask for permission before butask for forgiveness after It was the same thing ex-cept I did not ask for forgiveness It was a criminalact to sign the contract with Larry Perhaps I didnot read it completely but on that little sheet ofpaper was written that you are allowed to use oursoftware and install it and run the services for thewhole Germany So that was the thing that wewere the only one the only installation as Danielhad been in Dortmund for the Unix communityAnd that was the thing that upset the DFN whothought they were the institution the only one be-ing legalized to do that job That was a total misun-derstanding of what open system means by theway Open system does not only mean to use openprotocols but also to let the things grow bottom upand not any more top down Thatrsquos why we wereconvinced we were right with our approach andLarry backed us of course If he would have drawnthe plug we would have been lost of course

But on the other end from the technical sidewe were faster developing the infrastructure thanthey could follow That was the real thing RightIf you have an isolated service somebody can saymigrate it to a different installation Move it thereand hosting is done there the next day But it be-came so complex Perhaps it was visible on one ofthe charts what was the route that the GND wassupposed to take over They refused Because theysaid they were not able to run it without any inter-

Page 8

ruption It was clear if the email service would notrun for two days the users would really give run abig protest And so we worked in parallel and thenreached the good end where we moved to the fullInternet suite in 1989

And then we thought the game is over the bat-tle is over But then DFN moved to TCP and didthe same game but then concentrated on Dortmundand really got vulgar with DENIC the registry forGermany Then the Dortmund people had to fightand I could observe what happens

A mixture of thinking having the right visionor the right way and doing technical developmentfaster than them helped us to survive

Wolff Your biggest sin was success

Jennings This is the extraordinary thing thatSteve just said is that the biggest sin was that ev-eryone who was doing this work at the time wasdoing it sort of unofficially outside the official Eu-ropean government European Union funded OpenSystems Interconnection approach to networkingand outside the approaches that were approved bythe PPTs

Let me tell you just a little bit about the PPTsBack in lsquo83 when the early EARN leased lineswere connected and thatrsquos EARN the EuropeanAcademic Research Network the European part ofBITNET that I was involved in The FranceTelecom installed their end of the line to Romeone of the major links and they issued the bill forit But they refused to connect it because of theissue called ldquopassing of third party trafficrdquo It wasagainst the law for one party to take traffic a partythe third party to take traffic from the first partyand pass it on to another party Get this right Totake first partyhellip

Karrenberg It was illegal to compete with thePPT

Jennings Thatrsquos the summary It was illegal tocompete with the PTTs in every aspect of commu-nication In fact in Ireland the law was so writtenthat technically it was illegal to speak and to usethe air between people to communicate becausethat was actually covered by the communicationsact So it was a regulatory environment that was

very hostile then to doing ad hoc things that actu-ally worked and that continued on

Jay as a historian what lessons do you drawfrom this early history of the 80s

Hauben I think the lesson to draw is to realizethat first there was a vision a deep vision fromJCR Licklider and the people in the 60s That vi-sion was of the Intergalactic network Somehowby connecting a few you were eventually going toconnect everybody But itrsquos also true if anythinggood ever happened it is because some good peo-ple worked very hard over a very long period oftime to overcome the obstacles I think we knowsomething real happened because it was so hard toget there I think each of these stories contributesto the fact that despite the obstacles people have anunderstanding that what they are doing is suffi-ciently valuable and important that they will con-tinue trying to do it The job for the historian togather up these pieces which are not very well doc-umented and put them together to show the grandflow that has come forward

The surprising thing was that when Wernertold me the China email story it was a good storybut is it exactly accurate So I looked on theInternet and in books I found that there was a to-tally different story being told that didnrsquot have aninternational component For whatever reason themain essence of the first email China story whichwas that all of this activity was international wasmissing in the telling of it To clear that up itrequired digging When I dug I found Werner wastelling it straight

I think the value of what we are doing here iswe are hearing from some of the pioneers So weare getting the clues of how to get the history rightIt is very important that the stories be known andbe told and be gathered up So I hope there will bemore panels like this one

Jennings Excellent Larry tell us a little bit aboutthe Landweber Networkshops because thosenetworkshops were key

Landweber Go back to 1982 I went to a meetingin London that Peter Kirstein had And I hadnrsquottraveled very much and I decided gee wouldnrsquot itbe nice to see more parts of the world I had been atheoretician Mostly I went to one conference a

Page 9

year or two conferences a year But now I had got-ten involved in CSNET and had switched my workto networking sometime in the 70s And it was ex-citing and by coincidence I started being in contactwith people around the world who were thinkingabout national networks sometimes the Internetsometimes like EUNET and sometimes EARNBITNET and there was no easy way for people tocommunicate So what I did was try to identify oneor two people in each country As we went alongthe number of countries expanded So that webrought them together once a year in a nice placeand spent several days exchanging ideas exchang-ing software talking about plans and it was a wayof supporting the continuing development of thenetwork Daniel was at you were at a couple ofthese right I think Dennis was I met Dennis 1984in Paris and Werner was and Steve was (were youat no maybe you werenrsquot) 1984 And so graduallyfirst it was people from North America and Eu-rope Then there were some people from LatinAmerica Then there was Kilnam Chon from Ko-rea Then there was Jun Murai from Japan Andthen there was Florencio Utreras from Chile etcetc We just graduallymdashJuha Heinaumlnen from Fin-land and gradually we expanded and it built a com-munity and that community was very important forsharing ideas Might I add one more thing

Jennings Please

Landweber OK For me all of this has a real im-portant geopolitical economic global lesson Andit is that governments have no role in decidingwhich technologies are superior to other technolo-gies Thatrsquos the lesson In the case of the OSI ac-tivity governments around the world spent billionsof dollars in an effort to build a technology thatwas poorly conceived and not well executed inplanning it They very actively objected to andworked against the Internet

Now a former student of mine was at the Eu-ropean Commission and at one point he was incharge of supporting networking at the Commis-sion I always used to make a point of thankinghim whenever I saw him because through his ef-forts he helped American industry I mean if yougo back to 1980 US industry European industryJapanese industry were on an equal par when itcame to telecommunications Governments around

the world by suppressing the creativity of their in-dustry relating to the Internet made it possible forthe major companies in the Internet field toinitially develop in the United States And I think itsignificantly for a period hurt their economiesAnd so this is something I hope will be writtensome times by historians as a lesson There is awonderful paper by Franccedilois Fluckiger fromCERN which discusses this Itrsquos about 10 yearsold

Jennings Fifteen

Landweber fifteen years old which actually talksabout the European experience Thatrsquos the lessonthe global lesson that I have from this

Jennings Steve pick that up Governmentsshouldnrsquot mandate technology Isnrsquot that what wedid in the NSF Didnrsquot we didnrsquot I go around andparticularly say it has to be TCPIP

Landweber No No

Wolff But we did that Yes But we were lucky

Landweber May I interject

Jennings You may

Landweber There was a battle The NFSNET byaccident became Internet There was a committeeand if there was a battle the physicists wantedDECNET They wanted to have connections fromtheir universities to supercomputer centers andthey wanted DECNET They didnrsquot want InternetThere were a few people like Ken Wilson the No-bel Prize winner who wanted Internet And sothere really was also within the US govern-menthellip You were there when that was happening

Jennings I fought that happening

Landweber and so it wasnrsquot obvious that Internetwas going to be the backbone of the NSFNET

Jennings But Steve

Wolff No it wasnrsquot obvious But it was a battlethat Dennis you fought and I fought as well be-

Page 10

cause I think it was clear to us where the smartpeople were It is usually a good bet to ally your-self with intelligent people and it seemed to us thatthe most intelligent people were those who wereexplaining why TCPIP were good protocols andwhat the difficulties were with DECNET and theother various protocols which were being touted atthe time

But I wanted to say something to Jay I am try-ing to remember the source of a quote which Ithink is relevant to your activities Itrsquos from a Ger-man author and I do not know the German but theEnglish translation goes something like this Thosethings and deeds which are not written down arecondemned to oblivion and given over to a sepul-cher of darkness

Larry I am very grateful to you for not havingthrown anything away because the original sourcematerial is all that we have to reconstruct the ac-tual history

Jennings Daniel can you give us a quick com-ment because it is coming towards the time Giventhat we have talked about all the difficulties all thebattles how did the Internet actually come to Eu-rope

Karrenberg Oh thatrsquos a tall order [I think] Letme deviate slightly but still have some essence intothe story I think it came many many ways Thething about one of the reasons the TCPIP proto-cols were better than others is that they allowed thenetwork to grow without any central authoritywithout any central control central network centeror whatever And so people made a link here alink there a link there Werner converted his linksto the US I think at some point to IP We did thesame At some point we were just doing the storeand forward thing I talked about earlier And thenit became economical to buy actually leased linesThen we had the leased lines it was quite easy ac-tually it was like flipping a switch to put TCPIPon it And we didnrsquot have to ask anyone in the USpermission besides the people that we were actu-ally talking to Whether we could connect to theNSFNET and things like that was a different thingBut just to have this TCPIP link was just you callthem up or send them an email actually and sayhey um tomorrow at 1000 we switch UUCP toTCPIP and PIP and that was that And then when

we had more links into different countries that be-came leased lines it was very easy to convert themas well one after another and it grew organicallyAnd somebody else said I have an island here thatuses TCPIP Letrsquos make a link and connect theislands The Internet Thatrsquos where it came fromSo thatrsquos how it came Thatrsquos the one reason whyTCPIP was better The other obviously is that itdid not concern itself so much with the applica-tions like any of the other proposals did The appli-cations are actually outside in the end systemsrather than in the network The physicists could dotheir thing over it The computer scientists coulddo their thing over it and so on

Jennings It was an internet

Zorn For me the approval by the NSF was one ofthe important things for us to maintain the emailservice to China I am sure in China that approvalwas very little known There were many other at-tempts to draw lines and links to CERN and else-where Other groups tried their best to get a con-nection to some situation they worked with Whatwould have happened in the whole interconnectednetworks with BITNET and everything around ifthe NSF would have said no

Landweber To the China link

Zorn To China Politically ldquonordquo Like you say nonothing to North Korea nothing to hellip Was it pol-icy to control every network with every exit andwhatever in China Without permission it wouldbe thrown away and the links would be cut orwhat

Jennings Let me address the question and see ifpeople agree with me I think what would havehappened it would have been done anyway Fol-lowing Steversquos maxim Yes it was nice to ask forpermission and yes it was very nice to get the per-mission But I think back then we would have doneit anyway and then asked for forgiveness And Ithink we would have gotten away with it

Wolff Do you suppose I didnrsquot think thatLaughter

Page 11

Jennings Maybe we recognized it was going tohappen anyway

Hauben I donrsquot know if anyone would have paidattention Who down the line would have actuallysaid ldquoI am not going to pass on the email messagethatrsquos come I am not going to do relay these emailmessages any morerdquo I donrsquot know which humanbeing in the chain who had invested so much of hisor her time and energy and spirit would have saidldquoOK Irsquoll be the one who doesnrsquot continue itrdquo

Landweber If there were not even the hint of thepermission and if remember we were dependingon the Defense Department

Jennings Yes

Landweber Bob Kahn had I think a very similarworld view to Steve which was things happen andhe was hoping the network would grow But if hisbosses had learned of it the people who are thereal military people they could have made us stop

Jennings They were scary people back then

Landweber There were plenty of people andthere were countries where we would not have at-tempted We would not have attempted a link toNorth Korea for example in those days

Jennings Steve

Wolff One of the consequences might have beenthat it would have taken longer for what happenedin 1994 because the precedent set by getting per-mission from the United States government for aninterconnection I think and only Madame Hu canspeak to this but I imagine it set the stage for cer-tain things to happen within China so that laterwhen the formal basically the IP connection wassought that was a very formal ceremony and it wasan actual agreement between governments And Ithink that might have taken longer to happen if thestage had not been set by the first connection

Jennings So Madame Hu do you have somecomments on the battles these people fought to getthe Internet going

Hu The description of the early days when theInternet entered China may differentiate dependingon the different events the different individuals hadbeen experiencing at that time but the main streamis quite clear that the scientific research and inter-national exchange played the role of the engineAlso we should not leave out the High EnergyPhysics Institute of CAS with their partner theSLAC in Stanford University The earlier digitalcommunication between the latter partners tookplace even for 1 year ahead of the first email sentby Wang Yunfeng and Werner Zorn and theirteams to Germany via an X25 telecommunicationlink

Looking back to 1994 at that time my feelingwas the obstacles were not in the technology Be-cause the key person of our technology team Pro-fessor Qian Hualin and others told me that theyhad full success in the test with Sprint There wereno technical obstacles Everything is ready Justthe gate is still closed somehow So I remembervery clearly when I came to Dr Neal Lane theNSF Director at that time to ask for help That wasin the early April when I was in Washington DCas a member of the China delegation attending theUS-China Combined Committee Meeting on thecollaboration in Science and Technology betweenthe two countries Dr Neal Lane immediatelymade a chance for me to talk with Stephen WolffStephen just told me ldquoDonrsquot worry No problemYou will be connected to the Internetrdquo I was notvery sure about that I asked him is it that simpleHe said yes it is simple No contract no sign nodocument the only document we had providedbefore that was the AUP (Accepted Use PolicyAnd then after a few days I got the news from mycolleagues in China that the connection is done itgoes through smoothly Everything is OK Then Ithought ldquoOh Steve Wolff is really greatrdquo Thisman had a magic stick The magic stick pointedand the gate opened Is it that simple I guess it is

Jennings On what better note to end With all the hard work and all the battles at the

end of the day it took a little magic to make this fittogether and to forge the links to China to enablethe first email twenty years ago from China to therest of the world

Ladies and Gentlemen Panel thank you verymuch indeed Applause

Page 12

Transcribed from the video athttpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3204htmlSlightly edited by some of the participants

[Editorrsquos note The following is a news report onXinhuanet based on an intervew with WernerZorn Berlin Sept 19 2007]

ldquoAcross the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the worldrdquo

by Liming Wu(English translation by Virginia Zorn)

This is the first e-mail mesage sent fromBeijing abroad on Sept 20 1987 This also meansthat the internet era knocked on the door of China

Professor Werner Zorn who was then a com-puter science professor at the University Karlsruhein Germany and who sent this first email fromChina 20 years ago told the journalists when hewas interviewed by the Xinhuanet

In September 1987 Professor Zorn visitedBeijing for a scientific conference After four yearsof preparatory work and two weeks of extremelyhard tests the joint German-Chinese team success-fully connected the Beijing Institute of ComputerApplication (ICA) and the computing centre ofUniversity Karlsruhe On Sept 20 he made thedraft of this first e-mail and together with Profes-sor Yunfeng Wang successfully sent it to one ofthe computers at the University Karlsruhe

Prof Zorn who helped China to get intointernet remembered ldquoThe first response to themail came from an American computer scienceprofessor Larry Landweber Later on there weremore and more responses from all over the worldrdquo

Professor Zorn is known as the father of theInternet in Germany Germany entered the Interneton Aug 2 1984 with the first e-mail received byProf Zorn from CSNET In 2006 Zorn wasawarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts

Prof Zorn recalled that it was out of the simplewish to facilitate the communication between thecomputer science professionals to connect thecomputer networks from both countries A letter

required at that time at least eight days andtelephone or telegraph was extremely expensive

After the first success to help China to get intothe internet Prof Zorn continued to help Chinawith its development On Nov 28 1990 Prof Zornregistered CN domain name for China and set theprimary DNS server in University Karlsruhe Thisserver was handed over to China in 1994

Zorn said he did realise the epoch-makingmeaning of the first e-mail sent from China ldquoItwas a sensational eventrdquo But what the internetmeans today was out of his imagination at thattime

Twenty years later email has become the mostpopular communication media now China with162 million internet users is the second largestinternet country after USA The internet has be-come an indispensable part of life for many Chi-nese people and the internet technology is enjoyinga dramatic boom

Twenty years have passed Prof YunfengWang who worked together with Prof Zorn to getChina on the internet passed away ten years agoProf Zorn is now 64 years old and would retiresoon What comforts him is that the Chinese Peo-ple have not forgotten him Zorn said he often gotinvitations to visit China

On Sept 18 dozens of scholars worldwidegathered at the University of Potsdam inGermany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of theChinese internet Professor Qiheng Hu presented inthe name of the Chinese internet community acrystal award to Prof Zorn On the crystal award isinscribed

We hereby present our sincere appreciationto Professor Werner Zorn for your invalu-able support to Internetrsquos early developmentin China

Page 6

daytime the computers were used for serious pur-poses In the evenings we could do Unix And atthat time we heard about this Unix network thisUUCP network that was going on We had all thesoftware so we didnrsquot have that problem But howdo you connect How do you connect internation-ally The only way we could do that was throughthe telephone very much like Wernerrsquos first at-tempt to do the China thing

We had a little bit of an easier task because weonly had to connect to the next country the Neth-erlands And we did that We found some modemsand connected to them and got our email and ournet use

At some point the phone bills were so signifi-cant at the departmental level and questions wereasked And we explained and that was fine Thenother places in Germany running Unix also wantedto connect and they connected to us This waspurely lsquostore and forwardrsquo Your email mail wouldtake a day to get somewhere because it had to bewritten on one computer stored there They had tomake a telephone connection stored on the nextcomputer store and forward We could have emailconversations with like-minded people in the USfor instance that would be a message a day Butthat was tremendous I mean compared to postalmail and so forth That was fine

At some point this grew and I remember veryvividly how we were trying to find ways of actu-ally keeping it going financially It was very verydifficult in those times And if you are sitting in aninstitute like this itrsquos hard to imagine but twentyyears ago more than 20 years ago universitieswere basically state institutions run by state rulesrun by national rules and run by civil servants Itwas incredibly hard to take money into thoseplaces especially if it wasnrsquot like for big projectsit was just to pay the phone bill And so we had toovercome that kind of thing And the next thingwas we had to break the law because at some pointwe wanted faster speed and automatic dialing sothat when the international phone rates becamecheaper I think it was 1000pm or 1100pm at thetime we would not have to go into the computerroom and actually dial Amsterdam So we wantedan autodialer and we wanted quicker modems Andit was actually on the statute books a crime or anoffence Irsquom not sure The title of the law the Ger-man title of the law is Fernmeldeanlagengesetz I

donrsquot know whether it still exists But it was acriminal offense to connect anything that was notapproved by the state run PTT to the telephonenetwork And we were doing like ok do we reallywant this There is approved equipment but it isway beyond our budget So we went to our direc-tor Dr Rudolf Pater who is one of the other un-sung heroes of this and said we have this problemHe said ldquoya we donrsquot have the budgetrdquo We saidwe have this other solution We know it works Weknow it wonrsquot break the phone system They use itin the Netherlands Can we use that And he saidldquoI donrsquot want to know about itrdquo So we said wewant to buy it and itrsquos not that cheap It was likeabout what today would be 2 or 3 personalcomputers worth of money And we said we havealready talked to some of the visiting professorsand some of the other academics and we will justall chip in and we will buy it He said ldquoNa let meseerdquo And then sort of magically a week later wewere asked what is the specification of this stuffWhere can we buy it And it was actually boughtwith public money And I never know what it wassupposed to be that we ordered there That kind ofstuff And that kind of stuff is really the resistancethat you have to overcome And then the criminaloffence too And all these kinds of things And ofcourse we also had this experience when this grewand had like 50 60 70 80 places connected inGermany we faced resistance like ldquoYou are notdoing the right thing You are just making thingswork We want to do the politically correct thingrdquoAnd we were a bit more resilient to the kind of ap-proach that Larry just related because we were ac-tually funded by a big number of participants andwe werenrsquot in that sense part of the academic es-tablishment But it was quite clear that there wastremendous pressure put on the university to actu-ally either stop this altogether or play it down DrPater was one of the people who actually resistedthat

Can I do one more minute

Jennings Yes please

Karrenberg One day we have this meeting everyweek to see how things are going with the net-works thing and he goes I got a letter from thedean of the department He commends us on ourgood work facilitating the visiting professors and

Page 7

all that kind of stuff And he is really happy withwhat we are doing This is fine

At the same time I was in another function Iwas a student representative in university govern-ment Two weeks later in my pile of papers thissame letter appears And at the end there is a para-graph that says ldquoand by the way you are not sup-posed to become the German central hub of thisrdquoSo I see this and go hmmm and take the letter andgo to Dr Paterrsquos office and say ldquoHey did youmiss the last paragraphrdquo And he goes like ldquoOnetwo three hellip Daniel I chose to ignore thatrdquo

Jennings Steve tell us about what you chose toignore

Wolff It was not as much a matter of ignoringthings as trying to make it obvious to the right peo-ple You see by the time I got to the NSF afterDennis had broken the soil the notion of theInternet was obvious to computer scientistsbecause they had CSNET They knew it workedThey knew what it would do It was obvious touniversity IT departments because they hadBITNET They knew what it could do And it wasobvious to computational physicists because theyhad MFENET and NSFNET and they knew what itcould do But in total thatrsquos a very small popula-tion And in fact people who ran much of theNSFNET the regional networks were based instate run universities and many of them had bettheir careers and their jobs on making the networkwork So part of my job was to make it obvious tothe people who gave them money So I spent agreat deal of time talking to associations of stategovernors to a group of comptrollers of states tell-ing them that the money was not being badly sentSo most of my job was actually marketing tryingto convince people that this was a good thing andthe money was not being wasted

It seems as though each consistency had itsown vision of what the network was going to doIrsquom not sure what computer scientists thoughtabout it It was very clear what IT professionalswanted from it And it was perfectly obvious whatcomputational physicists wanted out of the net-work And they havenrsquot changed in twenty yearsThey wanted more faster But what is clear to menow is that the essential thing is that everyone hasa vision The hardest part of my job was trying to

communicate that vision to sufficiently many com-munities so it would catch hold somewhere

Jennings Werner letrsquos come back to you Tell usa little bit of the battle in Germany

Zorn Larry told something about the politicalpressure in the lsquo80s When we started with the ser-vices we expected that everybody would be happyin the German networking community But espe-cially in the German Research Network the DFNjust the opposite was the case I asked myselfwhat what is going on here We succeeded in ourproject but then those who gave the money or hasthe job to do that refused to accept that That wasthe signal that something is wrong in the system Iwas convinced that if their position is wrong oursmust be better or right So it was really a thingbetween right and wrong And of course we werefighting for our way Steversquos philosophy Larrytold us was donrsquot ask for permission before butask for forgiveness after It was the same thing ex-cept I did not ask for forgiveness It was a criminalact to sign the contract with Larry Perhaps I didnot read it completely but on that little sheet ofpaper was written that you are allowed to use oursoftware and install it and run the services for thewhole Germany So that was the thing that wewere the only one the only installation as Danielhad been in Dortmund for the Unix communityAnd that was the thing that upset the DFN whothought they were the institution the only one be-ing legalized to do that job That was a total misun-derstanding of what open system means by theway Open system does not only mean to use openprotocols but also to let the things grow bottom upand not any more top down Thatrsquos why we wereconvinced we were right with our approach andLarry backed us of course If he would have drawnthe plug we would have been lost of course

But on the other end from the technical sidewe were faster developing the infrastructure thanthey could follow That was the real thing RightIf you have an isolated service somebody can saymigrate it to a different installation Move it thereand hosting is done there the next day But it be-came so complex Perhaps it was visible on one ofthe charts what was the route that the GND wassupposed to take over They refused Because theysaid they were not able to run it without any inter-

Page 8

ruption It was clear if the email service would notrun for two days the users would really give run abig protest And so we worked in parallel and thenreached the good end where we moved to the fullInternet suite in 1989

And then we thought the game is over the bat-tle is over But then DFN moved to TCP and didthe same game but then concentrated on Dortmundand really got vulgar with DENIC the registry forGermany Then the Dortmund people had to fightand I could observe what happens

A mixture of thinking having the right visionor the right way and doing technical developmentfaster than them helped us to survive

Wolff Your biggest sin was success

Jennings This is the extraordinary thing thatSteve just said is that the biggest sin was that ev-eryone who was doing this work at the time wasdoing it sort of unofficially outside the official Eu-ropean government European Union funded OpenSystems Interconnection approach to networkingand outside the approaches that were approved bythe PPTs

Let me tell you just a little bit about the PPTsBack in lsquo83 when the early EARN leased lineswere connected and thatrsquos EARN the EuropeanAcademic Research Network the European part ofBITNET that I was involved in The FranceTelecom installed their end of the line to Romeone of the major links and they issued the bill forit But they refused to connect it because of theissue called ldquopassing of third party trafficrdquo It wasagainst the law for one party to take traffic a partythe third party to take traffic from the first partyand pass it on to another party Get this right Totake first partyhellip

Karrenberg It was illegal to compete with thePPT

Jennings Thatrsquos the summary It was illegal tocompete with the PTTs in every aspect of commu-nication In fact in Ireland the law was so writtenthat technically it was illegal to speak and to usethe air between people to communicate becausethat was actually covered by the communicationsact So it was a regulatory environment that was

very hostile then to doing ad hoc things that actu-ally worked and that continued on

Jay as a historian what lessons do you drawfrom this early history of the 80s

Hauben I think the lesson to draw is to realizethat first there was a vision a deep vision fromJCR Licklider and the people in the 60s That vi-sion was of the Intergalactic network Somehowby connecting a few you were eventually going toconnect everybody But itrsquos also true if anythinggood ever happened it is because some good peo-ple worked very hard over a very long period oftime to overcome the obstacles I think we knowsomething real happened because it was so hard toget there I think each of these stories contributesto the fact that despite the obstacles people have anunderstanding that what they are doing is suffi-ciently valuable and important that they will con-tinue trying to do it The job for the historian togather up these pieces which are not very well doc-umented and put them together to show the grandflow that has come forward

The surprising thing was that when Wernertold me the China email story it was a good storybut is it exactly accurate So I looked on theInternet and in books I found that there was a to-tally different story being told that didnrsquot have aninternational component For whatever reason themain essence of the first email China story whichwas that all of this activity was international wasmissing in the telling of it To clear that up itrequired digging When I dug I found Werner wastelling it straight

I think the value of what we are doing here iswe are hearing from some of the pioneers So weare getting the clues of how to get the history rightIt is very important that the stories be known andbe told and be gathered up So I hope there will bemore panels like this one

Jennings Excellent Larry tell us a little bit aboutthe Landweber Networkshops because thosenetworkshops were key

Landweber Go back to 1982 I went to a meetingin London that Peter Kirstein had And I hadnrsquottraveled very much and I decided gee wouldnrsquot itbe nice to see more parts of the world I had been atheoretician Mostly I went to one conference a

Page 9

year or two conferences a year But now I had got-ten involved in CSNET and had switched my workto networking sometime in the 70s And it was ex-citing and by coincidence I started being in contactwith people around the world who were thinkingabout national networks sometimes the Internetsometimes like EUNET and sometimes EARNBITNET and there was no easy way for people tocommunicate So what I did was try to identify oneor two people in each country As we went alongthe number of countries expanded So that webrought them together once a year in a nice placeand spent several days exchanging ideas exchang-ing software talking about plans and it was a wayof supporting the continuing development of thenetwork Daniel was at you were at a couple ofthese right I think Dennis was I met Dennis 1984in Paris and Werner was and Steve was (were youat no maybe you werenrsquot) 1984 And so graduallyfirst it was people from North America and Eu-rope Then there were some people from LatinAmerica Then there was Kilnam Chon from Ko-rea Then there was Jun Murai from Japan Andthen there was Florencio Utreras from Chile etcetc We just graduallymdashJuha Heinaumlnen from Fin-land and gradually we expanded and it built a com-munity and that community was very important forsharing ideas Might I add one more thing

Jennings Please

Landweber OK For me all of this has a real im-portant geopolitical economic global lesson Andit is that governments have no role in decidingwhich technologies are superior to other technolo-gies Thatrsquos the lesson In the case of the OSI ac-tivity governments around the world spent billionsof dollars in an effort to build a technology thatwas poorly conceived and not well executed inplanning it They very actively objected to andworked against the Internet

Now a former student of mine was at the Eu-ropean Commission and at one point he was incharge of supporting networking at the Commis-sion I always used to make a point of thankinghim whenever I saw him because through his ef-forts he helped American industry I mean if yougo back to 1980 US industry European industryJapanese industry were on an equal par when itcame to telecommunications Governments around

the world by suppressing the creativity of their in-dustry relating to the Internet made it possible forthe major companies in the Internet field toinitially develop in the United States And I think itsignificantly for a period hurt their economiesAnd so this is something I hope will be writtensome times by historians as a lesson There is awonderful paper by Franccedilois Fluckiger fromCERN which discusses this Itrsquos about 10 yearsold

Jennings Fifteen

Landweber fifteen years old which actually talksabout the European experience Thatrsquos the lessonthe global lesson that I have from this

Jennings Steve pick that up Governmentsshouldnrsquot mandate technology Isnrsquot that what wedid in the NSF Didnrsquot we didnrsquot I go around andparticularly say it has to be TCPIP

Landweber No No

Wolff But we did that Yes But we were lucky

Landweber May I interject

Jennings You may

Landweber There was a battle The NFSNET byaccident became Internet There was a committeeand if there was a battle the physicists wantedDECNET They wanted to have connections fromtheir universities to supercomputer centers andthey wanted DECNET They didnrsquot want InternetThere were a few people like Ken Wilson the No-bel Prize winner who wanted Internet And sothere really was also within the US govern-menthellip You were there when that was happening

Jennings I fought that happening

Landweber and so it wasnrsquot obvious that Internetwas going to be the backbone of the NSFNET

Jennings But Steve

Wolff No it wasnrsquot obvious But it was a battlethat Dennis you fought and I fought as well be-

Page 10

cause I think it was clear to us where the smartpeople were It is usually a good bet to ally your-self with intelligent people and it seemed to us thatthe most intelligent people were those who wereexplaining why TCPIP were good protocols andwhat the difficulties were with DECNET and theother various protocols which were being touted atthe time

But I wanted to say something to Jay I am try-ing to remember the source of a quote which Ithink is relevant to your activities Itrsquos from a Ger-man author and I do not know the German but theEnglish translation goes something like this Thosethings and deeds which are not written down arecondemned to oblivion and given over to a sepul-cher of darkness

Larry I am very grateful to you for not havingthrown anything away because the original sourcematerial is all that we have to reconstruct the ac-tual history

Jennings Daniel can you give us a quick com-ment because it is coming towards the time Giventhat we have talked about all the difficulties all thebattles how did the Internet actually come to Eu-rope

Karrenberg Oh thatrsquos a tall order [I think] Letme deviate slightly but still have some essence intothe story I think it came many many ways Thething about one of the reasons the TCPIP proto-cols were better than others is that they allowed thenetwork to grow without any central authoritywithout any central control central network centeror whatever And so people made a link here alink there a link there Werner converted his linksto the US I think at some point to IP We did thesame At some point we were just doing the storeand forward thing I talked about earlier And thenit became economical to buy actually leased linesThen we had the leased lines it was quite easy ac-tually it was like flipping a switch to put TCPIPon it And we didnrsquot have to ask anyone in the USpermission besides the people that we were actu-ally talking to Whether we could connect to theNSFNET and things like that was a different thingBut just to have this TCPIP link was just you callthem up or send them an email actually and sayhey um tomorrow at 1000 we switch UUCP toTCPIP and PIP and that was that And then when

we had more links into different countries that be-came leased lines it was very easy to convert themas well one after another and it grew organicallyAnd somebody else said I have an island here thatuses TCPIP Letrsquos make a link and connect theislands The Internet Thatrsquos where it came fromSo thatrsquos how it came Thatrsquos the one reason whyTCPIP was better The other obviously is that itdid not concern itself so much with the applica-tions like any of the other proposals did The appli-cations are actually outside in the end systemsrather than in the network The physicists could dotheir thing over it The computer scientists coulddo their thing over it and so on

Jennings It was an internet

Zorn For me the approval by the NSF was one ofthe important things for us to maintain the emailservice to China I am sure in China that approvalwas very little known There were many other at-tempts to draw lines and links to CERN and else-where Other groups tried their best to get a con-nection to some situation they worked with Whatwould have happened in the whole interconnectednetworks with BITNET and everything around ifthe NSF would have said no

Landweber To the China link

Zorn To China Politically ldquonordquo Like you say nonothing to North Korea nothing to hellip Was it pol-icy to control every network with every exit andwhatever in China Without permission it wouldbe thrown away and the links would be cut orwhat

Jennings Let me address the question and see ifpeople agree with me I think what would havehappened it would have been done anyway Fol-lowing Steversquos maxim Yes it was nice to ask forpermission and yes it was very nice to get the per-mission But I think back then we would have doneit anyway and then asked for forgiveness And Ithink we would have gotten away with it

Wolff Do you suppose I didnrsquot think thatLaughter

Page 11

Jennings Maybe we recognized it was going tohappen anyway

Hauben I donrsquot know if anyone would have paidattention Who down the line would have actuallysaid ldquoI am not going to pass on the email messagethatrsquos come I am not going to do relay these emailmessages any morerdquo I donrsquot know which humanbeing in the chain who had invested so much of hisor her time and energy and spirit would have saidldquoOK Irsquoll be the one who doesnrsquot continue itrdquo

Landweber If there were not even the hint of thepermission and if remember we were dependingon the Defense Department

Jennings Yes

Landweber Bob Kahn had I think a very similarworld view to Steve which was things happen andhe was hoping the network would grow But if hisbosses had learned of it the people who are thereal military people they could have made us stop

Jennings They were scary people back then

Landweber There were plenty of people andthere were countries where we would not have at-tempted We would not have attempted a link toNorth Korea for example in those days

Jennings Steve

Wolff One of the consequences might have beenthat it would have taken longer for what happenedin 1994 because the precedent set by getting per-mission from the United States government for aninterconnection I think and only Madame Hu canspeak to this but I imagine it set the stage for cer-tain things to happen within China so that laterwhen the formal basically the IP connection wassought that was a very formal ceremony and it wasan actual agreement between governments And Ithink that might have taken longer to happen if thestage had not been set by the first connection

Jennings So Madame Hu do you have somecomments on the battles these people fought to getthe Internet going

Hu The description of the early days when theInternet entered China may differentiate dependingon the different events the different individuals hadbeen experiencing at that time but the main streamis quite clear that the scientific research and inter-national exchange played the role of the engineAlso we should not leave out the High EnergyPhysics Institute of CAS with their partner theSLAC in Stanford University The earlier digitalcommunication between the latter partners tookplace even for 1 year ahead of the first email sentby Wang Yunfeng and Werner Zorn and theirteams to Germany via an X25 telecommunicationlink

Looking back to 1994 at that time my feelingwas the obstacles were not in the technology Be-cause the key person of our technology team Pro-fessor Qian Hualin and others told me that theyhad full success in the test with Sprint There wereno technical obstacles Everything is ready Justthe gate is still closed somehow So I remembervery clearly when I came to Dr Neal Lane theNSF Director at that time to ask for help That wasin the early April when I was in Washington DCas a member of the China delegation attending theUS-China Combined Committee Meeting on thecollaboration in Science and Technology betweenthe two countries Dr Neal Lane immediatelymade a chance for me to talk with Stephen WolffStephen just told me ldquoDonrsquot worry No problemYou will be connected to the Internetrdquo I was notvery sure about that I asked him is it that simpleHe said yes it is simple No contract no sign nodocument the only document we had providedbefore that was the AUP (Accepted Use PolicyAnd then after a few days I got the news from mycolleagues in China that the connection is done itgoes through smoothly Everything is OK Then Ithought ldquoOh Steve Wolff is really greatrdquo Thisman had a magic stick The magic stick pointedand the gate opened Is it that simple I guess it is

Jennings On what better note to end With all the hard work and all the battles at the

end of the day it took a little magic to make this fittogether and to forge the links to China to enablethe first email twenty years ago from China to therest of the world

Ladies and Gentlemen Panel thank you verymuch indeed Applause

Page 12

Transcribed from the video athttpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3204htmlSlightly edited by some of the participants

[Editorrsquos note The following is a news report onXinhuanet based on an intervew with WernerZorn Berlin Sept 19 2007]

ldquoAcross the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the worldrdquo

by Liming Wu(English translation by Virginia Zorn)

This is the first e-mail mesage sent fromBeijing abroad on Sept 20 1987 This also meansthat the internet era knocked on the door of China

Professor Werner Zorn who was then a com-puter science professor at the University Karlsruhein Germany and who sent this first email fromChina 20 years ago told the journalists when hewas interviewed by the Xinhuanet

In September 1987 Professor Zorn visitedBeijing for a scientific conference After four yearsof preparatory work and two weeks of extremelyhard tests the joint German-Chinese team success-fully connected the Beijing Institute of ComputerApplication (ICA) and the computing centre ofUniversity Karlsruhe On Sept 20 he made thedraft of this first e-mail and together with Profes-sor Yunfeng Wang successfully sent it to one ofthe computers at the University Karlsruhe

Prof Zorn who helped China to get intointernet remembered ldquoThe first response to themail came from an American computer scienceprofessor Larry Landweber Later on there weremore and more responses from all over the worldrdquo

Professor Zorn is known as the father of theInternet in Germany Germany entered the Interneton Aug 2 1984 with the first e-mail received byProf Zorn from CSNET In 2006 Zorn wasawarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts

Prof Zorn recalled that it was out of the simplewish to facilitate the communication between thecomputer science professionals to connect thecomputer networks from both countries A letter

required at that time at least eight days andtelephone or telegraph was extremely expensive

After the first success to help China to get intothe internet Prof Zorn continued to help Chinawith its development On Nov 28 1990 Prof Zornregistered CN domain name for China and set theprimary DNS server in University Karlsruhe Thisserver was handed over to China in 1994

Zorn said he did realise the epoch-makingmeaning of the first e-mail sent from China ldquoItwas a sensational eventrdquo But what the internetmeans today was out of his imagination at thattime

Twenty years later email has become the mostpopular communication media now China with162 million internet users is the second largestinternet country after USA The internet has be-come an indispensable part of life for many Chi-nese people and the internet technology is enjoyinga dramatic boom

Twenty years have passed Prof YunfengWang who worked together with Prof Zorn to getChina on the internet passed away ten years agoProf Zorn is now 64 years old and would retiresoon What comforts him is that the Chinese Peo-ple have not forgotten him Zorn said he often gotinvitations to visit China

On Sept 18 dozens of scholars worldwidegathered at the University of Potsdam inGermany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of theChinese internet Professor Qiheng Hu presented inthe name of the Chinese internet community acrystal award to Prof Zorn On the crystal award isinscribed

We hereby present our sincere appreciationto Professor Werner Zorn for your invalu-able support to Internetrsquos early developmentin China

Page 7

all that kind of stuff And he is really happy withwhat we are doing This is fine

At the same time I was in another function Iwas a student representative in university govern-ment Two weeks later in my pile of papers thissame letter appears And at the end there is a para-graph that says ldquoand by the way you are not sup-posed to become the German central hub of thisrdquoSo I see this and go hmmm and take the letter andgo to Dr Paterrsquos office and say ldquoHey did youmiss the last paragraphrdquo And he goes like ldquoOnetwo three hellip Daniel I chose to ignore thatrdquo

Jennings Steve tell us about what you chose toignore

Wolff It was not as much a matter of ignoringthings as trying to make it obvious to the right peo-ple You see by the time I got to the NSF afterDennis had broken the soil the notion of theInternet was obvious to computer scientistsbecause they had CSNET They knew it workedThey knew what it would do It was obvious touniversity IT departments because they hadBITNET They knew what it could do And it wasobvious to computational physicists because theyhad MFENET and NSFNET and they knew what itcould do But in total thatrsquos a very small popula-tion And in fact people who ran much of theNSFNET the regional networks were based instate run universities and many of them had bettheir careers and their jobs on making the networkwork So part of my job was to make it obvious tothe people who gave them money So I spent agreat deal of time talking to associations of stategovernors to a group of comptrollers of states tell-ing them that the money was not being badly sentSo most of my job was actually marketing tryingto convince people that this was a good thing andthe money was not being wasted

It seems as though each consistency had itsown vision of what the network was going to doIrsquom not sure what computer scientists thoughtabout it It was very clear what IT professionalswanted from it And it was perfectly obvious whatcomputational physicists wanted out of the net-work And they havenrsquot changed in twenty yearsThey wanted more faster But what is clear to menow is that the essential thing is that everyone hasa vision The hardest part of my job was trying to

communicate that vision to sufficiently many com-munities so it would catch hold somewhere

Jennings Werner letrsquos come back to you Tell usa little bit of the battle in Germany

Zorn Larry told something about the politicalpressure in the lsquo80s When we started with the ser-vices we expected that everybody would be happyin the German networking community But espe-cially in the German Research Network the DFNjust the opposite was the case I asked myselfwhat what is going on here We succeeded in ourproject but then those who gave the money or hasthe job to do that refused to accept that That wasthe signal that something is wrong in the system Iwas convinced that if their position is wrong oursmust be better or right So it was really a thingbetween right and wrong And of course we werefighting for our way Steversquos philosophy Larrytold us was donrsquot ask for permission before butask for forgiveness after It was the same thing ex-cept I did not ask for forgiveness It was a criminalact to sign the contract with Larry Perhaps I didnot read it completely but on that little sheet ofpaper was written that you are allowed to use oursoftware and install it and run the services for thewhole Germany So that was the thing that wewere the only one the only installation as Danielhad been in Dortmund for the Unix communityAnd that was the thing that upset the DFN whothought they were the institution the only one be-ing legalized to do that job That was a total misun-derstanding of what open system means by theway Open system does not only mean to use openprotocols but also to let the things grow bottom upand not any more top down Thatrsquos why we wereconvinced we were right with our approach andLarry backed us of course If he would have drawnthe plug we would have been lost of course

But on the other end from the technical sidewe were faster developing the infrastructure thanthey could follow That was the real thing RightIf you have an isolated service somebody can saymigrate it to a different installation Move it thereand hosting is done there the next day But it be-came so complex Perhaps it was visible on one ofthe charts what was the route that the GND wassupposed to take over They refused Because theysaid they were not able to run it without any inter-

Page 8

ruption It was clear if the email service would notrun for two days the users would really give run abig protest And so we worked in parallel and thenreached the good end where we moved to the fullInternet suite in 1989

And then we thought the game is over the bat-tle is over But then DFN moved to TCP and didthe same game but then concentrated on Dortmundand really got vulgar with DENIC the registry forGermany Then the Dortmund people had to fightand I could observe what happens

A mixture of thinking having the right visionor the right way and doing technical developmentfaster than them helped us to survive

Wolff Your biggest sin was success

Jennings This is the extraordinary thing thatSteve just said is that the biggest sin was that ev-eryone who was doing this work at the time wasdoing it sort of unofficially outside the official Eu-ropean government European Union funded OpenSystems Interconnection approach to networkingand outside the approaches that were approved bythe PPTs

Let me tell you just a little bit about the PPTsBack in lsquo83 when the early EARN leased lineswere connected and thatrsquos EARN the EuropeanAcademic Research Network the European part ofBITNET that I was involved in The FranceTelecom installed their end of the line to Romeone of the major links and they issued the bill forit But they refused to connect it because of theissue called ldquopassing of third party trafficrdquo It wasagainst the law for one party to take traffic a partythe third party to take traffic from the first partyand pass it on to another party Get this right Totake first partyhellip

Karrenberg It was illegal to compete with thePPT

Jennings Thatrsquos the summary It was illegal tocompete with the PTTs in every aspect of commu-nication In fact in Ireland the law was so writtenthat technically it was illegal to speak and to usethe air between people to communicate becausethat was actually covered by the communicationsact So it was a regulatory environment that was

very hostile then to doing ad hoc things that actu-ally worked and that continued on

Jay as a historian what lessons do you drawfrom this early history of the 80s

Hauben I think the lesson to draw is to realizethat first there was a vision a deep vision fromJCR Licklider and the people in the 60s That vi-sion was of the Intergalactic network Somehowby connecting a few you were eventually going toconnect everybody But itrsquos also true if anythinggood ever happened it is because some good peo-ple worked very hard over a very long period oftime to overcome the obstacles I think we knowsomething real happened because it was so hard toget there I think each of these stories contributesto the fact that despite the obstacles people have anunderstanding that what they are doing is suffi-ciently valuable and important that they will con-tinue trying to do it The job for the historian togather up these pieces which are not very well doc-umented and put them together to show the grandflow that has come forward

The surprising thing was that when Wernertold me the China email story it was a good storybut is it exactly accurate So I looked on theInternet and in books I found that there was a to-tally different story being told that didnrsquot have aninternational component For whatever reason themain essence of the first email China story whichwas that all of this activity was international wasmissing in the telling of it To clear that up itrequired digging When I dug I found Werner wastelling it straight

I think the value of what we are doing here iswe are hearing from some of the pioneers So weare getting the clues of how to get the history rightIt is very important that the stories be known andbe told and be gathered up So I hope there will bemore panels like this one

Jennings Excellent Larry tell us a little bit aboutthe Landweber Networkshops because thosenetworkshops were key

Landweber Go back to 1982 I went to a meetingin London that Peter Kirstein had And I hadnrsquottraveled very much and I decided gee wouldnrsquot itbe nice to see more parts of the world I had been atheoretician Mostly I went to one conference a

Page 9

year or two conferences a year But now I had got-ten involved in CSNET and had switched my workto networking sometime in the 70s And it was ex-citing and by coincidence I started being in contactwith people around the world who were thinkingabout national networks sometimes the Internetsometimes like EUNET and sometimes EARNBITNET and there was no easy way for people tocommunicate So what I did was try to identify oneor two people in each country As we went alongthe number of countries expanded So that webrought them together once a year in a nice placeand spent several days exchanging ideas exchang-ing software talking about plans and it was a wayof supporting the continuing development of thenetwork Daniel was at you were at a couple ofthese right I think Dennis was I met Dennis 1984in Paris and Werner was and Steve was (were youat no maybe you werenrsquot) 1984 And so graduallyfirst it was people from North America and Eu-rope Then there were some people from LatinAmerica Then there was Kilnam Chon from Ko-rea Then there was Jun Murai from Japan Andthen there was Florencio Utreras from Chile etcetc We just graduallymdashJuha Heinaumlnen from Fin-land and gradually we expanded and it built a com-munity and that community was very important forsharing ideas Might I add one more thing

Jennings Please

Landweber OK For me all of this has a real im-portant geopolitical economic global lesson Andit is that governments have no role in decidingwhich technologies are superior to other technolo-gies Thatrsquos the lesson In the case of the OSI ac-tivity governments around the world spent billionsof dollars in an effort to build a technology thatwas poorly conceived and not well executed inplanning it They very actively objected to andworked against the Internet

Now a former student of mine was at the Eu-ropean Commission and at one point he was incharge of supporting networking at the Commis-sion I always used to make a point of thankinghim whenever I saw him because through his ef-forts he helped American industry I mean if yougo back to 1980 US industry European industryJapanese industry were on an equal par when itcame to telecommunications Governments around

the world by suppressing the creativity of their in-dustry relating to the Internet made it possible forthe major companies in the Internet field toinitially develop in the United States And I think itsignificantly for a period hurt their economiesAnd so this is something I hope will be writtensome times by historians as a lesson There is awonderful paper by Franccedilois Fluckiger fromCERN which discusses this Itrsquos about 10 yearsold

Jennings Fifteen

Landweber fifteen years old which actually talksabout the European experience Thatrsquos the lessonthe global lesson that I have from this

Jennings Steve pick that up Governmentsshouldnrsquot mandate technology Isnrsquot that what wedid in the NSF Didnrsquot we didnrsquot I go around andparticularly say it has to be TCPIP

Landweber No No

Wolff But we did that Yes But we were lucky

Landweber May I interject

Jennings You may

Landweber There was a battle The NFSNET byaccident became Internet There was a committeeand if there was a battle the physicists wantedDECNET They wanted to have connections fromtheir universities to supercomputer centers andthey wanted DECNET They didnrsquot want InternetThere were a few people like Ken Wilson the No-bel Prize winner who wanted Internet And sothere really was also within the US govern-menthellip You were there when that was happening

Jennings I fought that happening

Landweber and so it wasnrsquot obvious that Internetwas going to be the backbone of the NSFNET

Jennings But Steve

Wolff No it wasnrsquot obvious But it was a battlethat Dennis you fought and I fought as well be-

Page 10

cause I think it was clear to us where the smartpeople were It is usually a good bet to ally your-self with intelligent people and it seemed to us thatthe most intelligent people were those who wereexplaining why TCPIP were good protocols andwhat the difficulties were with DECNET and theother various protocols which were being touted atthe time

But I wanted to say something to Jay I am try-ing to remember the source of a quote which Ithink is relevant to your activities Itrsquos from a Ger-man author and I do not know the German but theEnglish translation goes something like this Thosethings and deeds which are not written down arecondemned to oblivion and given over to a sepul-cher of darkness

Larry I am very grateful to you for not havingthrown anything away because the original sourcematerial is all that we have to reconstruct the ac-tual history

Jennings Daniel can you give us a quick com-ment because it is coming towards the time Giventhat we have talked about all the difficulties all thebattles how did the Internet actually come to Eu-rope

Karrenberg Oh thatrsquos a tall order [I think] Letme deviate slightly but still have some essence intothe story I think it came many many ways Thething about one of the reasons the TCPIP proto-cols were better than others is that they allowed thenetwork to grow without any central authoritywithout any central control central network centeror whatever And so people made a link here alink there a link there Werner converted his linksto the US I think at some point to IP We did thesame At some point we were just doing the storeand forward thing I talked about earlier And thenit became economical to buy actually leased linesThen we had the leased lines it was quite easy ac-tually it was like flipping a switch to put TCPIPon it And we didnrsquot have to ask anyone in the USpermission besides the people that we were actu-ally talking to Whether we could connect to theNSFNET and things like that was a different thingBut just to have this TCPIP link was just you callthem up or send them an email actually and sayhey um tomorrow at 1000 we switch UUCP toTCPIP and PIP and that was that And then when

we had more links into different countries that be-came leased lines it was very easy to convert themas well one after another and it grew organicallyAnd somebody else said I have an island here thatuses TCPIP Letrsquos make a link and connect theislands The Internet Thatrsquos where it came fromSo thatrsquos how it came Thatrsquos the one reason whyTCPIP was better The other obviously is that itdid not concern itself so much with the applica-tions like any of the other proposals did The appli-cations are actually outside in the end systemsrather than in the network The physicists could dotheir thing over it The computer scientists coulddo their thing over it and so on

Jennings It was an internet

Zorn For me the approval by the NSF was one ofthe important things for us to maintain the emailservice to China I am sure in China that approvalwas very little known There were many other at-tempts to draw lines and links to CERN and else-where Other groups tried their best to get a con-nection to some situation they worked with Whatwould have happened in the whole interconnectednetworks with BITNET and everything around ifthe NSF would have said no

Landweber To the China link

Zorn To China Politically ldquonordquo Like you say nonothing to North Korea nothing to hellip Was it pol-icy to control every network with every exit andwhatever in China Without permission it wouldbe thrown away and the links would be cut orwhat

Jennings Let me address the question and see ifpeople agree with me I think what would havehappened it would have been done anyway Fol-lowing Steversquos maxim Yes it was nice to ask forpermission and yes it was very nice to get the per-mission But I think back then we would have doneit anyway and then asked for forgiveness And Ithink we would have gotten away with it

Wolff Do you suppose I didnrsquot think thatLaughter

Page 11

Jennings Maybe we recognized it was going tohappen anyway

Hauben I donrsquot know if anyone would have paidattention Who down the line would have actuallysaid ldquoI am not going to pass on the email messagethatrsquos come I am not going to do relay these emailmessages any morerdquo I donrsquot know which humanbeing in the chain who had invested so much of hisor her time and energy and spirit would have saidldquoOK Irsquoll be the one who doesnrsquot continue itrdquo

Landweber If there were not even the hint of thepermission and if remember we were dependingon the Defense Department

Jennings Yes

Landweber Bob Kahn had I think a very similarworld view to Steve which was things happen andhe was hoping the network would grow But if hisbosses had learned of it the people who are thereal military people they could have made us stop

Jennings They were scary people back then

Landweber There were plenty of people andthere were countries where we would not have at-tempted We would not have attempted a link toNorth Korea for example in those days

Jennings Steve

Wolff One of the consequences might have beenthat it would have taken longer for what happenedin 1994 because the precedent set by getting per-mission from the United States government for aninterconnection I think and only Madame Hu canspeak to this but I imagine it set the stage for cer-tain things to happen within China so that laterwhen the formal basically the IP connection wassought that was a very formal ceremony and it wasan actual agreement between governments And Ithink that might have taken longer to happen if thestage had not been set by the first connection

Jennings So Madame Hu do you have somecomments on the battles these people fought to getthe Internet going

Hu The description of the early days when theInternet entered China may differentiate dependingon the different events the different individuals hadbeen experiencing at that time but the main streamis quite clear that the scientific research and inter-national exchange played the role of the engineAlso we should not leave out the High EnergyPhysics Institute of CAS with their partner theSLAC in Stanford University The earlier digitalcommunication between the latter partners tookplace even for 1 year ahead of the first email sentby Wang Yunfeng and Werner Zorn and theirteams to Germany via an X25 telecommunicationlink

Looking back to 1994 at that time my feelingwas the obstacles were not in the technology Be-cause the key person of our technology team Pro-fessor Qian Hualin and others told me that theyhad full success in the test with Sprint There wereno technical obstacles Everything is ready Justthe gate is still closed somehow So I remembervery clearly when I came to Dr Neal Lane theNSF Director at that time to ask for help That wasin the early April when I was in Washington DCas a member of the China delegation attending theUS-China Combined Committee Meeting on thecollaboration in Science and Technology betweenthe two countries Dr Neal Lane immediatelymade a chance for me to talk with Stephen WolffStephen just told me ldquoDonrsquot worry No problemYou will be connected to the Internetrdquo I was notvery sure about that I asked him is it that simpleHe said yes it is simple No contract no sign nodocument the only document we had providedbefore that was the AUP (Accepted Use PolicyAnd then after a few days I got the news from mycolleagues in China that the connection is done itgoes through smoothly Everything is OK Then Ithought ldquoOh Steve Wolff is really greatrdquo Thisman had a magic stick The magic stick pointedand the gate opened Is it that simple I guess it is

Jennings On what better note to end With all the hard work and all the battles at the

end of the day it took a little magic to make this fittogether and to forge the links to China to enablethe first email twenty years ago from China to therest of the world

Ladies and Gentlemen Panel thank you verymuch indeed Applause

Page 12

Transcribed from the video athttpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3204htmlSlightly edited by some of the participants

[Editorrsquos note The following is a news report onXinhuanet based on an intervew with WernerZorn Berlin Sept 19 2007]

ldquoAcross the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the worldrdquo

by Liming Wu(English translation by Virginia Zorn)

This is the first e-mail mesage sent fromBeijing abroad on Sept 20 1987 This also meansthat the internet era knocked on the door of China

Professor Werner Zorn who was then a com-puter science professor at the University Karlsruhein Germany and who sent this first email fromChina 20 years ago told the journalists when hewas interviewed by the Xinhuanet

In September 1987 Professor Zorn visitedBeijing for a scientific conference After four yearsof preparatory work and two weeks of extremelyhard tests the joint German-Chinese team success-fully connected the Beijing Institute of ComputerApplication (ICA) and the computing centre ofUniversity Karlsruhe On Sept 20 he made thedraft of this first e-mail and together with Profes-sor Yunfeng Wang successfully sent it to one ofthe computers at the University Karlsruhe

Prof Zorn who helped China to get intointernet remembered ldquoThe first response to themail came from an American computer scienceprofessor Larry Landweber Later on there weremore and more responses from all over the worldrdquo

Professor Zorn is known as the father of theInternet in Germany Germany entered the Interneton Aug 2 1984 with the first e-mail received byProf Zorn from CSNET In 2006 Zorn wasawarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts

Prof Zorn recalled that it was out of the simplewish to facilitate the communication between thecomputer science professionals to connect thecomputer networks from both countries A letter

required at that time at least eight days andtelephone or telegraph was extremely expensive

After the first success to help China to get intothe internet Prof Zorn continued to help Chinawith its development On Nov 28 1990 Prof Zornregistered CN domain name for China and set theprimary DNS server in University Karlsruhe Thisserver was handed over to China in 1994

Zorn said he did realise the epoch-makingmeaning of the first e-mail sent from China ldquoItwas a sensational eventrdquo But what the internetmeans today was out of his imagination at thattime

Twenty years later email has become the mostpopular communication media now China with162 million internet users is the second largestinternet country after USA The internet has be-come an indispensable part of life for many Chi-nese people and the internet technology is enjoyinga dramatic boom

Twenty years have passed Prof YunfengWang who worked together with Prof Zorn to getChina on the internet passed away ten years agoProf Zorn is now 64 years old and would retiresoon What comforts him is that the Chinese Peo-ple have not forgotten him Zorn said he often gotinvitations to visit China

On Sept 18 dozens of scholars worldwidegathered at the University of Potsdam inGermany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of theChinese internet Professor Qiheng Hu presented inthe name of the Chinese internet community acrystal award to Prof Zorn On the crystal award isinscribed

We hereby present our sincere appreciationto Professor Werner Zorn for your invalu-able support to Internetrsquos early developmentin China

Page 8

ruption It was clear if the email service would notrun for two days the users would really give run abig protest And so we worked in parallel and thenreached the good end where we moved to the fullInternet suite in 1989

And then we thought the game is over the bat-tle is over But then DFN moved to TCP and didthe same game but then concentrated on Dortmundand really got vulgar with DENIC the registry forGermany Then the Dortmund people had to fightand I could observe what happens

A mixture of thinking having the right visionor the right way and doing technical developmentfaster than them helped us to survive

Wolff Your biggest sin was success

Jennings This is the extraordinary thing thatSteve just said is that the biggest sin was that ev-eryone who was doing this work at the time wasdoing it sort of unofficially outside the official Eu-ropean government European Union funded OpenSystems Interconnection approach to networkingand outside the approaches that were approved bythe PPTs

Let me tell you just a little bit about the PPTsBack in lsquo83 when the early EARN leased lineswere connected and thatrsquos EARN the EuropeanAcademic Research Network the European part ofBITNET that I was involved in The FranceTelecom installed their end of the line to Romeone of the major links and they issued the bill forit But they refused to connect it because of theissue called ldquopassing of third party trafficrdquo It wasagainst the law for one party to take traffic a partythe third party to take traffic from the first partyand pass it on to another party Get this right Totake first partyhellip

Karrenberg It was illegal to compete with thePPT

Jennings Thatrsquos the summary It was illegal tocompete with the PTTs in every aspect of commu-nication In fact in Ireland the law was so writtenthat technically it was illegal to speak and to usethe air between people to communicate becausethat was actually covered by the communicationsact So it was a regulatory environment that was

very hostile then to doing ad hoc things that actu-ally worked and that continued on

Jay as a historian what lessons do you drawfrom this early history of the 80s

Hauben I think the lesson to draw is to realizethat first there was a vision a deep vision fromJCR Licklider and the people in the 60s That vi-sion was of the Intergalactic network Somehowby connecting a few you were eventually going toconnect everybody But itrsquos also true if anythinggood ever happened it is because some good peo-ple worked very hard over a very long period oftime to overcome the obstacles I think we knowsomething real happened because it was so hard toget there I think each of these stories contributesto the fact that despite the obstacles people have anunderstanding that what they are doing is suffi-ciently valuable and important that they will con-tinue trying to do it The job for the historian togather up these pieces which are not very well doc-umented and put them together to show the grandflow that has come forward

The surprising thing was that when Wernertold me the China email story it was a good storybut is it exactly accurate So I looked on theInternet and in books I found that there was a to-tally different story being told that didnrsquot have aninternational component For whatever reason themain essence of the first email China story whichwas that all of this activity was international wasmissing in the telling of it To clear that up itrequired digging When I dug I found Werner wastelling it straight

I think the value of what we are doing here iswe are hearing from some of the pioneers So weare getting the clues of how to get the history rightIt is very important that the stories be known andbe told and be gathered up So I hope there will bemore panels like this one

Jennings Excellent Larry tell us a little bit aboutthe Landweber Networkshops because thosenetworkshops were key

Landweber Go back to 1982 I went to a meetingin London that Peter Kirstein had And I hadnrsquottraveled very much and I decided gee wouldnrsquot itbe nice to see more parts of the world I had been atheoretician Mostly I went to one conference a

Page 9

year or two conferences a year But now I had got-ten involved in CSNET and had switched my workto networking sometime in the 70s And it was ex-citing and by coincidence I started being in contactwith people around the world who were thinkingabout national networks sometimes the Internetsometimes like EUNET and sometimes EARNBITNET and there was no easy way for people tocommunicate So what I did was try to identify oneor two people in each country As we went alongthe number of countries expanded So that webrought them together once a year in a nice placeand spent several days exchanging ideas exchang-ing software talking about plans and it was a wayof supporting the continuing development of thenetwork Daniel was at you were at a couple ofthese right I think Dennis was I met Dennis 1984in Paris and Werner was and Steve was (were youat no maybe you werenrsquot) 1984 And so graduallyfirst it was people from North America and Eu-rope Then there were some people from LatinAmerica Then there was Kilnam Chon from Ko-rea Then there was Jun Murai from Japan Andthen there was Florencio Utreras from Chile etcetc We just graduallymdashJuha Heinaumlnen from Fin-land and gradually we expanded and it built a com-munity and that community was very important forsharing ideas Might I add one more thing

Jennings Please

Landweber OK For me all of this has a real im-portant geopolitical economic global lesson Andit is that governments have no role in decidingwhich technologies are superior to other technolo-gies Thatrsquos the lesson In the case of the OSI ac-tivity governments around the world spent billionsof dollars in an effort to build a technology thatwas poorly conceived and not well executed inplanning it They very actively objected to andworked against the Internet

Now a former student of mine was at the Eu-ropean Commission and at one point he was incharge of supporting networking at the Commis-sion I always used to make a point of thankinghim whenever I saw him because through his ef-forts he helped American industry I mean if yougo back to 1980 US industry European industryJapanese industry were on an equal par when itcame to telecommunications Governments around

the world by suppressing the creativity of their in-dustry relating to the Internet made it possible forthe major companies in the Internet field toinitially develop in the United States And I think itsignificantly for a period hurt their economiesAnd so this is something I hope will be writtensome times by historians as a lesson There is awonderful paper by Franccedilois Fluckiger fromCERN which discusses this Itrsquos about 10 yearsold

Jennings Fifteen

Landweber fifteen years old which actually talksabout the European experience Thatrsquos the lessonthe global lesson that I have from this

Jennings Steve pick that up Governmentsshouldnrsquot mandate technology Isnrsquot that what wedid in the NSF Didnrsquot we didnrsquot I go around andparticularly say it has to be TCPIP

Landweber No No

Wolff But we did that Yes But we were lucky

Landweber May I interject

Jennings You may

Landweber There was a battle The NFSNET byaccident became Internet There was a committeeand if there was a battle the physicists wantedDECNET They wanted to have connections fromtheir universities to supercomputer centers andthey wanted DECNET They didnrsquot want InternetThere were a few people like Ken Wilson the No-bel Prize winner who wanted Internet And sothere really was also within the US govern-menthellip You were there when that was happening

Jennings I fought that happening

Landweber and so it wasnrsquot obvious that Internetwas going to be the backbone of the NSFNET

Jennings But Steve

Wolff No it wasnrsquot obvious But it was a battlethat Dennis you fought and I fought as well be-

Page 10

cause I think it was clear to us where the smartpeople were It is usually a good bet to ally your-self with intelligent people and it seemed to us thatthe most intelligent people were those who wereexplaining why TCPIP were good protocols andwhat the difficulties were with DECNET and theother various protocols which were being touted atthe time

But I wanted to say something to Jay I am try-ing to remember the source of a quote which Ithink is relevant to your activities Itrsquos from a Ger-man author and I do not know the German but theEnglish translation goes something like this Thosethings and deeds which are not written down arecondemned to oblivion and given over to a sepul-cher of darkness

Larry I am very grateful to you for not havingthrown anything away because the original sourcematerial is all that we have to reconstruct the ac-tual history

Jennings Daniel can you give us a quick com-ment because it is coming towards the time Giventhat we have talked about all the difficulties all thebattles how did the Internet actually come to Eu-rope

Karrenberg Oh thatrsquos a tall order [I think] Letme deviate slightly but still have some essence intothe story I think it came many many ways Thething about one of the reasons the TCPIP proto-cols were better than others is that they allowed thenetwork to grow without any central authoritywithout any central control central network centeror whatever And so people made a link here alink there a link there Werner converted his linksto the US I think at some point to IP We did thesame At some point we were just doing the storeand forward thing I talked about earlier And thenit became economical to buy actually leased linesThen we had the leased lines it was quite easy ac-tually it was like flipping a switch to put TCPIPon it And we didnrsquot have to ask anyone in the USpermission besides the people that we were actu-ally talking to Whether we could connect to theNSFNET and things like that was a different thingBut just to have this TCPIP link was just you callthem up or send them an email actually and sayhey um tomorrow at 1000 we switch UUCP toTCPIP and PIP and that was that And then when

we had more links into different countries that be-came leased lines it was very easy to convert themas well one after another and it grew organicallyAnd somebody else said I have an island here thatuses TCPIP Letrsquos make a link and connect theislands The Internet Thatrsquos where it came fromSo thatrsquos how it came Thatrsquos the one reason whyTCPIP was better The other obviously is that itdid not concern itself so much with the applica-tions like any of the other proposals did The appli-cations are actually outside in the end systemsrather than in the network The physicists could dotheir thing over it The computer scientists coulddo their thing over it and so on

Jennings It was an internet

Zorn For me the approval by the NSF was one ofthe important things for us to maintain the emailservice to China I am sure in China that approvalwas very little known There were many other at-tempts to draw lines and links to CERN and else-where Other groups tried their best to get a con-nection to some situation they worked with Whatwould have happened in the whole interconnectednetworks with BITNET and everything around ifthe NSF would have said no

Landweber To the China link

Zorn To China Politically ldquonordquo Like you say nonothing to North Korea nothing to hellip Was it pol-icy to control every network with every exit andwhatever in China Without permission it wouldbe thrown away and the links would be cut orwhat

Jennings Let me address the question and see ifpeople agree with me I think what would havehappened it would have been done anyway Fol-lowing Steversquos maxim Yes it was nice to ask forpermission and yes it was very nice to get the per-mission But I think back then we would have doneit anyway and then asked for forgiveness And Ithink we would have gotten away with it

Wolff Do you suppose I didnrsquot think thatLaughter

Page 11

Jennings Maybe we recognized it was going tohappen anyway

Hauben I donrsquot know if anyone would have paidattention Who down the line would have actuallysaid ldquoI am not going to pass on the email messagethatrsquos come I am not going to do relay these emailmessages any morerdquo I donrsquot know which humanbeing in the chain who had invested so much of hisor her time and energy and spirit would have saidldquoOK Irsquoll be the one who doesnrsquot continue itrdquo

Landweber If there were not even the hint of thepermission and if remember we were dependingon the Defense Department

Jennings Yes

Landweber Bob Kahn had I think a very similarworld view to Steve which was things happen andhe was hoping the network would grow But if hisbosses had learned of it the people who are thereal military people they could have made us stop

Jennings They were scary people back then

Landweber There were plenty of people andthere were countries where we would not have at-tempted We would not have attempted a link toNorth Korea for example in those days

Jennings Steve

Wolff One of the consequences might have beenthat it would have taken longer for what happenedin 1994 because the precedent set by getting per-mission from the United States government for aninterconnection I think and only Madame Hu canspeak to this but I imagine it set the stage for cer-tain things to happen within China so that laterwhen the formal basically the IP connection wassought that was a very formal ceremony and it wasan actual agreement between governments And Ithink that might have taken longer to happen if thestage had not been set by the first connection

Jennings So Madame Hu do you have somecomments on the battles these people fought to getthe Internet going

Hu The description of the early days when theInternet entered China may differentiate dependingon the different events the different individuals hadbeen experiencing at that time but the main streamis quite clear that the scientific research and inter-national exchange played the role of the engineAlso we should not leave out the High EnergyPhysics Institute of CAS with their partner theSLAC in Stanford University The earlier digitalcommunication between the latter partners tookplace even for 1 year ahead of the first email sentby Wang Yunfeng and Werner Zorn and theirteams to Germany via an X25 telecommunicationlink

Looking back to 1994 at that time my feelingwas the obstacles were not in the technology Be-cause the key person of our technology team Pro-fessor Qian Hualin and others told me that theyhad full success in the test with Sprint There wereno technical obstacles Everything is ready Justthe gate is still closed somehow So I remembervery clearly when I came to Dr Neal Lane theNSF Director at that time to ask for help That wasin the early April when I was in Washington DCas a member of the China delegation attending theUS-China Combined Committee Meeting on thecollaboration in Science and Technology betweenthe two countries Dr Neal Lane immediatelymade a chance for me to talk with Stephen WolffStephen just told me ldquoDonrsquot worry No problemYou will be connected to the Internetrdquo I was notvery sure about that I asked him is it that simpleHe said yes it is simple No contract no sign nodocument the only document we had providedbefore that was the AUP (Accepted Use PolicyAnd then after a few days I got the news from mycolleagues in China that the connection is done itgoes through smoothly Everything is OK Then Ithought ldquoOh Steve Wolff is really greatrdquo Thisman had a magic stick The magic stick pointedand the gate opened Is it that simple I guess it is

Jennings On what better note to end With all the hard work and all the battles at the

end of the day it took a little magic to make this fittogether and to forge the links to China to enablethe first email twenty years ago from China to therest of the world

Ladies and Gentlemen Panel thank you verymuch indeed Applause

Page 12

Transcribed from the video athttpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3204htmlSlightly edited by some of the participants

[Editorrsquos note The following is a news report onXinhuanet based on an intervew with WernerZorn Berlin Sept 19 2007]

ldquoAcross the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the worldrdquo

by Liming Wu(English translation by Virginia Zorn)

This is the first e-mail mesage sent fromBeijing abroad on Sept 20 1987 This also meansthat the internet era knocked on the door of China

Professor Werner Zorn who was then a com-puter science professor at the University Karlsruhein Germany and who sent this first email fromChina 20 years ago told the journalists when hewas interviewed by the Xinhuanet

In September 1987 Professor Zorn visitedBeijing for a scientific conference After four yearsof preparatory work and two weeks of extremelyhard tests the joint German-Chinese team success-fully connected the Beijing Institute of ComputerApplication (ICA) and the computing centre ofUniversity Karlsruhe On Sept 20 he made thedraft of this first e-mail and together with Profes-sor Yunfeng Wang successfully sent it to one ofthe computers at the University Karlsruhe

Prof Zorn who helped China to get intointernet remembered ldquoThe first response to themail came from an American computer scienceprofessor Larry Landweber Later on there weremore and more responses from all over the worldrdquo

Professor Zorn is known as the father of theInternet in Germany Germany entered the Interneton Aug 2 1984 with the first e-mail received byProf Zorn from CSNET In 2006 Zorn wasawarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts

Prof Zorn recalled that it was out of the simplewish to facilitate the communication between thecomputer science professionals to connect thecomputer networks from both countries A letter

required at that time at least eight days andtelephone or telegraph was extremely expensive

After the first success to help China to get intothe internet Prof Zorn continued to help Chinawith its development On Nov 28 1990 Prof Zornregistered CN domain name for China and set theprimary DNS server in University Karlsruhe Thisserver was handed over to China in 1994

Zorn said he did realise the epoch-makingmeaning of the first e-mail sent from China ldquoItwas a sensational eventrdquo But what the internetmeans today was out of his imagination at thattime

Twenty years later email has become the mostpopular communication media now China with162 million internet users is the second largestinternet country after USA The internet has be-come an indispensable part of life for many Chi-nese people and the internet technology is enjoyinga dramatic boom

Twenty years have passed Prof YunfengWang who worked together with Prof Zorn to getChina on the internet passed away ten years agoProf Zorn is now 64 years old and would retiresoon What comforts him is that the Chinese Peo-ple have not forgotten him Zorn said he often gotinvitations to visit China

On Sept 18 dozens of scholars worldwidegathered at the University of Potsdam inGermany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of theChinese internet Professor Qiheng Hu presented inthe name of the Chinese internet community acrystal award to Prof Zorn On the crystal award isinscribed

We hereby present our sincere appreciationto Professor Werner Zorn for your invalu-able support to Internetrsquos early developmentin China

Page 9

year or two conferences a year But now I had got-ten involved in CSNET and had switched my workto networking sometime in the 70s And it was ex-citing and by coincidence I started being in contactwith people around the world who were thinkingabout national networks sometimes the Internetsometimes like EUNET and sometimes EARNBITNET and there was no easy way for people tocommunicate So what I did was try to identify oneor two people in each country As we went alongthe number of countries expanded So that webrought them together once a year in a nice placeand spent several days exchanging ideas exchang-ing software talking about plans and it was a wayof supporting the continuing development of thenetwork Daniel was at you were at a couple ofthese right I think Dennis was I met Dennis 1984in Paris and Werner was and Steve was (were youat no maybe you werenrsquot) 1984 And so graduallyfirst it was people from North America and Eu-rope Then there were some people from LatinAmerica Then there was Kilnam Chon from Ko-rea Then there was Jun Murai from Japan Andthen there was Florencio Utreras from Chile etcetc We just graduallymdashJuha Heinaumlnen from Fin-land and gradually we expanded and it built a com-munity and that community was very important forsharing ideas Might I add one more thing

Jennings Please

Landweber OK For me all of this has a real im-portant geopolitical economic global lesson Andit is that governments have no role in decidingwhich technologies are superior to other technolo-gies Thatrsquos the lesson In the case of the OSI ac-tivity governments around the world spent billionsof dollars in an effort to build a technology thatwas poorly conceived and not well executed inplanning it They very actively objected to andworked against the Internet

Now a former student of mine was at the Eu-ropean Commission and at one point he was incharge of supporting networking at the Commis-sion I always used to make a point of thankinghim whenever I saw him because through his ef-forts he helped American industry I mean if yougo back to 1980 US industry European industryJapanese industry were on an equal par when itcame to telecommunications Governments around

the world by suppressing the creativity of their in-dustry relating to the Internet made it possible forthe major companies in the Internet field toinitially develop in the United States And I think itsignificantly for a period hurt their economiesAnd so this is something I hope will be writtensome times by historians as a lesson There is awonderful paper by Franccedilois Fluckiger fromCERN which discusses this Itrsquos about 10 yearsold

Jennings Fifteen

Landweber fifteen years old which actually talksabout the European experience Thatrsquos the lessonthe global lesson that I have from this

Jennings Steve pick that up Governmentsshouldnrsquot mandate technology Isnrsquot that what wedid in the NSF Didnrsquot we didnrsquot I go around andparticularly say it has to be TCPIP

Landweber No No

Wolff But we did that Yes But we were lucky

Landweber May I interject

Jennings You may

Landweber There was a battle The NFSNET byaccident became Internet There was a committeeand if there was a battle the physicists wantedDECNET They wanted to have connections fromtheir universities to supercomputer centers andthey wanted DECNET They didnrsquot want InternetThere were a few people like Ken Wilson the No-bel Prize winner who wanted Internet And sothere really was also within the US govern-menthellip You were there when that was happening

Jennings I fought that happening

Landweber and so it wasnrsquot obvious that Internetwas going to be the backbone of the NSFNET

Jennings But Steve

Wolff No it wasnrsquot obvious But it was a battlethat Dennis you fought and I fought as well be-

Page 10

cause I think it was clear to us where the smartpeople were It is usually a good bet to ally your-self with intelligent people and it seemed to us thatthe most intelligent people were those who wereexplaining why TCPIP were good protocols andwhat the difficulties were with DECNET and theother various protocols which were being touted atthe time

But I wanted to say something to Jay I am try-ing to remember the source of a quote which Ithink is relevant to your activities Itrsquos from a Ger-man author and I do not know the German but theEnglish translation goes something like this Thosethings and deeds which are not written down arecondemned to oblivion and given over to a sepul-cher of darkness

Larry I am very grateful to you for not havingthrown anything away because the original sourcematerial is all that we have to reconstruct the ac-tual history

Jennings Daniel can you give us a quick com-ment because it is coming towards the time Giventhat we have talked about all the difficulties all thebattles how did the Internet actually come to Eu-rope

Karrenberg Oh thatrsquos a tall order [I think] Letme deviate slightly but still have some essence intothe story I think it came many many ways Thething about one of the reasons the TCPIP proto-cols were better than others is that they allowed thenetwork to grow without any central authoritywithout any central control central network centeror whatever And so people made a link here alink there a link there Werner converted his linksto the US I think at some point to IP We did thesame At some point we were just doing the storeand forward thing I talked about earlier And thenit became economical to buy actually leased linesThen we had the leased lines it was quite easy ac-tually it was like flipping a switch to put TCPIPon it And we didnrsquot have to ask anyone in the USpermission besides the people that we were actu-ally talking to Whether we could connect to theNSFNET and things like that was a different thingBut just to have this TCPIP link was just you callthem up or send them an email actually and sayhey um tomorrow at 1000 we switch UUCP toTCPIP and PIP and that was that And then when

we had more links into different countries that be-came leased lines it was very easy to convert themas well one after another and it grew organicallyAnd somebody else said I have an island here thatuses TCPIP Letrsquos make a link and connect theislands The Internet Thatrsquos where it came fromSo thatrsquos how it came Thatrsquos the one reason whyTCPIP was better The other obviously is that itdid not concern itself so much with the applica-tions like any of the other proposals did The appli-cations are actually outside in the end systemsrather than in the network The physicists could dotheir thing over it The computer scientists coulddo their thing over it and so on

Jennings It was an internet

Zorn For me the approval by the NSF was one ofthe important things for us to maintain the emailservice to China I am sure in China that approvalwas very little known There were many other at-tempts to draw lines and links to CERN and else-where Other groups tried their best to get a con-nection to some situation they worked with Whatwould have happened in the whole interconnectednetworks with BITNET and everything around ifthe NSF would have said no

Landweber To the China link

Zorn To China Politically ldquonordquo Like you say nonothing to North Korea nothing to hellip Was it pol-icy to control every network with every exit andwhatever in China Without permission it wouldbe thrown away and the links would be cut orwhat

Jennings Let me address the question and see ifpeople agree with me I think what would havehappened it would have been done anyway Fol-lowing Steversquos maxim Yes it was nice to ask forpermission and yes it was very nice to get the per-mission But I think back then we would have doneit anyway and then asked for forgiveness And Ithink we would have gotten away with it

Wolff Do you suppose I didnrsquot think thatLaughter

Page 11

Jennings Maybe we recognized it was going tohappen anyway

Hauben I donrsquot know if anyone would have paidattention Who down the line would have actuallysaid ldquoI am not going to pass on the email messagethatrsquos come I am not going to do relay these emailmessages any morerdquo I donrsquot know which humanbeing in the chain who had invested so much of hisor her time and energy and spirit would have saidldquoOK Irsquoll be the one who doesnrsquot continue itrdquo

Landweber If there were not even the hint of thepermission and if remember we were dependingon the Defense Department

Jennings Yes

Landweber Bob Kahn had I think a very similarworld view to Steve which was things happen andhe was hoping the network would grow But if hisbosses had learned of it the people who are thereal military people they could have made us stop

Jennings They were scary people back then

Landweber There were plenty of people andthere were countries where we would not have at-tempted We would not have attempted a link toNorth Korea for example in those days

Jennings Steve

Wolff One of the consequences might have beenthat it would have taken longer for what happenedin 1994 because the precedent set by getting per-mission from the United States government for aninterconnection I think and only Madame Hu canspeak to this but I imagine it set the stage for cer-tain things to happen within China so that laterwhen the formal basically the IP connection wassought that was a very formal ceremony and it wasan actual agreement between governments And Ithink that might have taken longer to happen if thestage had not been set by the first connection

Jennings So Madame Hu do you have somecomments on the battles these people fought to getthe Internet going

Hu The description of the early days when theInternet entered China may differentiate dependingon the different events the different individuals hadbeen experiencing at that time but the main streamis quite clear that the scientific research and inter-national exchange played the role of the engineAlso we should not leave out the High EnergyPhysics Institute of CAS with their partner theSLAC in Stanford University The earlier digitalcommunication between the latter partners tookplace even for 1 year ahead of the first email sentby Wang Yunfeng and Werner Zorn and theirteams to Germany via an X25 telecommunicationlink

Looking back to 1994 at that time my feelingwas the obstacles were not in the technology Be-cause the key person of our technology team Pro-fessor Qian Hualin and others told me that theyhad full success in the test with Sprint There wereno technical obstacles Everything is ready Justthe gate is still closed somehow So I remembervery clearly when I came to Dr Neal Lane theNSF Director at that time to ask for help That wasin the early April when I was in Washington DCas a member of the China delegation attending theUS-China Combined Committee Meeting on thecollaboration in Science and Technology betweenthe two countries Dr Neal Lane immediatelymade a chance for me to talk with Stephen WolffStephen just told me ldquoDonrsquot worry No problemYou will be connected to the Internetrdquo I was notvery sure about that I asked him is it that simpleHe said yes it is simple No contract no sign nodocument the only document we had providedbefore that was the AUP (Accepted Use PolicyAnd then after a few days I got the news from mycolleagues in China that the connection is done itgoes through smoothly Everything is OK Then Ithought ldquoOh Steve Wolff is really greatrdquo Thisman had a magic stick The magic stick pointedand the gate opened Is it that simple I guess it is

Jennings On what better note to end With all the hard work and all the battles at the

end of the day it took a little magic to make this fittogether and to forge the links to China to enablethe first email twenty years ago from China to therest of the world

Ladies and Gentlemen Panel thank you verymuch indeed Applause

Page 12

Transcribed from the video athttpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3204htmlSlightly edited by some of the participants

[Editorrsquos note The following is a news report onXinhuanet based on an intervew with WernerZorn Berlin Sept 19 2007]

ldquoAcross the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the worldrdquo

by Liming Wu(English translation by Virginia Zorn)

This is the first e-mail mesage sent fromBeijing abroad on Sept 20 1987 This also meansthat the internet era knocked on the door of China

Professor Werner Zorn who was then a com-puter science professor at the University Karlsruhein Germany and who sent this first email fromChina 20 years ago told the journalists when hewas interviewed by the Xinhuanet

In September 1987 Professor Zorn visitedBeijing for a scientific conference After four yearsof preparatory work and two weeks of extremelyhard tests the joint German-Chinese team success-fully connected the Beijing Institute of ComputerApplication (ICA) and the computing centre ofUniversity Karlsruhe On Sept 20 he made thedraft of this first e-mail and together with Profes-sor Yunfeng Wang successfully sent it to one ofthe computers at the University Karlsruhe

Prof Zorn who helped China to get intointernet remembered ldquoThe first response to themail came from an American computer scienceprofessor Larry Landweber Later on there weremore and more responses from all over the worldrdquo

Professor Zorn is known as the father of theInternet in Germany Germany entered the Interneton Aug 2 1984 with the first e-mail received byProf Zorn from CSNET In 2006 Zorn wasawarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts

Prof Zorn recalled that it was out of the simplewish to facilitate the communication between thecomputer science professionals to connect thecomputer networks from both countries A letter

required at that time at least eight days andtelephone or telegraph was extremely expensive

After the first success to help China to get intothe internet Prof Zorn continued to help Chinawith its development On Nov 28 1990 Prof Zornregistered CN domain name for China and set theprimary DNS server in University Karlsruhe Thisserver was handed over to China in 1994

Zorn said he did realise the epoch-makingmeaning of the first e-mail sent from China ldquoItwas a sensational eventrdquo But what the internetmeans today was out of his imagination at thattime

Twenty years later email has become the mostpopular communication media now China with162 million internet users is the second largestinternet country after USA The internet has be-come an indispensable part of life for many Chi-nese people and the internet technology is enjoyinga dramatic boom

Twenty years have passed Prof YunfengWang who worked together with Prof Zorn to getChina on the internet passed away ten years agoProf Zorn is now 64 years old and would retiresoon What comforts him is that the Chinese Peo-ple have not forgotten him Zorn said he often gotinvitations to visit China

On Sept 18 dozens of scholars worldwidegathered at the University of Potsdam inGermany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of theChinese internet Professor Qiheng Hu presented inthe name of the Chinese internet community acrystal award to Prof Zorn On the crystal award isinscribed

We hereby present our sincere appreciationto Professor Werner Zorn for your invalu-able support to Internetrsquos early developmentin China

Page 10

cause I think it was clear to us where the smartpeople were It is usually a good bet to ally your-self with intelligent people and it seemed to us thatthe most intelligent people were those who wereexplaining why TCPIP were good protocols andwhat the difficulties were with DECNET and theother various protocols which were being touted atthe time

But I wanted to say something to Jay I am try-ing to remember the source of a quote which Ithink is relevant to your activities Itrsquos from a Ger-man author and I do not know the German but theEnglish translation goes something like this Thosethings and deeds which are not written down arecondemned to oblivion and given over to a sepul-cher of darkness

Larry I am very grateful to you for not havingthrown anything away because the original sourcematerial is all that we have to reconstruct the ac-tual history

Jennings Daniel can you give us a quick com-ment because it is coming towards the time Giventhat we have talked about all the difficulties all thebattles how did the Internet actually come to Eu-rope

Karrenberg Oh thatrsquos a tall order [I think] Letme deviate slightly but still have some essence intothe story I think it came many many ways Thething about one of the reasons the TCPIP proto-cols were better than others is that they allowed thenetwork to grow without any central authoritywithout any central control central network centeror whatever And so people made a link here alink there a link there Werner converted his linksto the US I think at some point to IP We did thesame At some point we were just doing the storeand forward thing I talked about earlier And thenit became economical to buy actually leased linesThen we had the leased lines it was quite easy ac-tually it was like flipping a switch to put TCPIPon it And we didnrsquot have to ask anyone in the USpermission besides the people that we were actu-ally talking to Whether we could connect to theNSFNET and things like that was a different thingBut just to have this TCPIP link was just you callthem up or send them an email actually and sayhey um tomorrow at 1000 we switch UUCP toTCPIP and PIP and that was that And then when

we had more links into different countries that be-came leased lines it was very easy to convert themas well one after another and it grew organicallyAnd somebody else said I have an island here thatuses TCPIP Letrsquos make a link and connect theislands The Internet Thatrsquos where it came fromSo thatrsquos how it came Thatrsquos the one reason whyTCPIP was better The other obviously is that itdid not concern itself so much with the applica-tions like any of the other proposals did The appli-cations are actually outside in the end systemsrather than in the network The physicists could dotheir thing over it The computer scientists coulddo their thing over it and so on

Jennings It was an internet

Zorn For me the approval by the NSF was one ofthe important things for us to maintain the emailservice to China I am sure in China that approvalwas very little known There were many other at-tempts to draw lines and links to CERN and else-where Other groups tried their best to get a con-nection to some situation they worked with Whatwould have happened in the whole interconnectednetworks with BITNET and everything around ifthe NSF would have said no

Landweber To the China link

Zorn To China Politically ldquonordquo Like you say nonothing to North Korea nothing to hellip Was it pol-icy to control every network with every exit andwhatever in China Without permission it wouldbe thrown away and the links would be cut orwhat

Jennings Let me address the question and see ifpeople agree with me I think what would havehappened it would have been done anyway Fol-lowing Steversquos maxim Yes it was nice to ask forpermission and yes it was very nice to get the per-mission But I think back then we would have doneit anyway and then asked for forgiveness And Ithink we would have gotten away with it

Wolff Do you suppose I didnrsquot think thatLaughter

Page 11

Jennings Maybe we recognized it was going tohappen anyway

Hauben I donrsquot know if anyone would have paidattention Who down the line would have actuallysaid ldquoI am not going to pass on the email messagethatrsquos come I am not going to do relay these emailmessages any morerdquo I donrsquot know which humanbeing in the chain who had invested so much of hisor her time and energy and spirit would have saidldquoOK Irsquoll be the one who doesnrsquot continue itrdquo

Landweber If there were not even the hint of thepermission and if remember we were dependingon the Defense Department

Jennings Yes

Landweber Bob Kahn had I think a very similarworld view to Steve which was things happen andhe was hoping the network would grow But if hisbosses had learned of it the people who are thereal military people they could have made us stop

Jennings They were scary people back then

Landweber There were plenty of people andthere were countries where we would not have at-tempted We would not have attempted a link toNorth Korea for example in those days

Jennings Steve

Wolff One of the consequences might have beenthat it would have taken longer for what happenedin 1994 because the precedent set by getting per-mission from the United States government for aninterconnection I think and only Madame Hu canspeak to this but I imagine it set the stage for cer-tain things to happen within China so that laterwhen the formal basically the IP connection wassought that was a very formal ceremony and it wasan actual agreement between governments And Ithink that might have taken longer to happen if thestage had not been set by the first connection

Jennings So Madame Hu do you have somecomments on the battles these people fought to getthe Internet going

Hu The description of the early days when theInternet entered China may differentiate dependingon the different events the different individuals hadbeen experiencing at that time but the main streamis quite clear that the scientific research and inter-national exchange played the role of the engineAlso we should not leave out the High EnergyPhysics Institute of CAS with their partner theSLAC in Stanford University The earlier digitalcommunication between the latter partners tookplace even for 1 year ahead of the first email sentby Wang Yunfeng and Werner Zorn and theirteams to Germany via an X25 telecommunicationlink

Looking back to 1994 at that time my feelingwas the obstacles were not in the technology Be-cause the key person of our technology team Pro-fessor Qian Hualin and others told me that theyhad full success in the test with Sprint There wereno technical obstacles Everything is ready Justthe gate is still closed somehow So I remembervery clearly when I came to Dr Neal Lane theNSF Director at that time to ask for help That wasin the early April when I was in Washington DCas a member of the China delegation attending theUS-China Combined Committee Meeting on thecollaboration in Science and Technology betweenthe two countries Dr Neal Lane immediatelymade a chance for me to talk with Stephen WolffStephen just told me ldquoDonrsquot worry No problemYou will be connected to the Internetrdquo I was notvery sure about that I asked him is it that simpleHe said yes it is simple No contract no sign nodocument the only document we had providedbefore that was the AUP (Accepted Use PolicyAnd then after a few days I got the news from mycolleagues in China that the connection is done itgoes through smoothly Everything is OK Then Ithought ldquoOh Steve Wolff is really greatrdquo Thisman had a magic stick The magic stick pointedand the gate opened Is it that simple I guess it is

Jennings On what better note to end With all the hard work and all the battles at the

end of the day it took a little magic to make this fittogether and to forge the links to China to enablethe first email twenty years ago from China to therest of the world

Ladies and Gentlemen Panel thank you verymuch indeed Applause

Page 12

Transcribed from the video athttpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3204htmlSlightly edited by some of the participants

[Editorrsquos note The following is a news report onXinhuanet based on an intervew with WernerZorn Berlin Sept 19 2007]

ldquoAcross the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the worldrdquo

by Liming Wu(English translation by Virginia Zorn)

This is the first e-mail mesage sent fromBeijing abroad on Sept 20 1987 This also meansthat the internet era knocked on the door of China

Professor Werner Zorn who was then a com-puter science professor at the University Karlsruhein Germany and who sent this first email fromChina 20 years ago told the journalists when hewas interviewed by the Xinhuanet

In September 1987 Professor Zorn visitedBeijing for a scientific conference After four yearsof preparatory work and two weeks of extremelyhard tests the joint German-Chinese team success-fully connected the Beijing Institute of ComputerApplication (ICA) and the computing centre ofUniversity Karlsruhe On Sept 20 he made thedraft of this first e-mail and together with Profes-sor Yunfeng Wang successfully sent it to one ofthe computers at the University Karlsruhe

Prof Zorn who helped China to get intointernet remembered ldquoThe first response to themail came from an American computer scienceprofessor Larry Landweber Later on there weremore and more responses from all over the worldrdquo

Professor Zorn is known as the father of theInternet in Germany Germany entered the Interneton Aug 2 1984 with the first e-mail received byProf Zorn from CSNET In 2006 Zorn wasawarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts

Prof Zorn recalled that it was out of the simplewish to facilitate the communication between thecomputer science professionals to connect thecomputer networks from both countries A letter

required at that time at least eight days andtelephone or telegraph was extremely expensive

After the first success to help China to get intothe internet Prof Zorn continued to help Chinawith its development On Nov 28 1990 Prof Zornregistered CN domain name for China and set theprimary DNS server in University Karlsruhe Thisserver was handed over to China in 1994

Zorn said he did realise the epoch-makingmeaning of the first e-mail sent from China ldquoItwas a sensational eventrdquo But what the internetmeans today was out of his imagination at thattime

Twenty years later email has become the mostpopular communication media now China with162 million internet users is the second largestinternet country after USA The internet has be-come an indispensable part of life for many Chi-nese people and the internet technology is enjoyinga dramatic boom

Twenty years have passed Prof YunfengWang who worked together with Prof Zorn to getChina on the internet passed away ten years agoProf Zorn is now 64 years old and would retiresoon What comforts him is that the Chinese Peo-ple have not forgotten him Zorn said he often gotinvitations to visit China

On Sept 18 dozens of scholars worldwidegathered at the University of Potsdam inGermany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of theChinese internet Professor Qiheng Hu presented inthe name of the Chinese internet community acrystal award to Prof Zorn On the crystal award isinscribed

We hereby present our sincere appreciationto Professor Werner Zorn for your invalu-able support to Internetrsquos early developmentin China

Page 11

Jennings Maybe we recognized it was going tohappen anyway

Hauben I donrsquot know if anyone would have paidattention Who down the line would have actuallysaid ldquoI am not going to pass on the email messagethatrsquos come I am not going to do relay these emailmessages any morerdquo I donrsquot know which humanbeing in the chain who had invested so much of hisor her time and energy and spirit would have saidldquoOK Irsquoll be the one who doesnrsquot continue itrdquo

Landweber If there were not even the hint of thepermission and if remember we were dependingon the Defense Department

Jennings Yes

Landweber Bob Kahn had I think a very similarworld view to Steve which was things happen andhe was hoping the network would grow But if hisbosses had learned of it the people who are thereal military people they could have made us stop

Jennings They were scary people back then

Landweber There were plenty of people andthere were countries where we would not have at-tempted We would not have attempted a link toNorth Korea for example in those days

Jennings Steve

Wolff One of the consequences might have beenthat it would have taken longer for what happenedin 1994 because the precedent set by getting per-mission from the United States government for aninterconnection I think and only Madame Hu canspeak to this but I imagine it set the stage for cer-tain things to happen within China so that laterwhen the formal basically the IP connection wassought that was a very formal ceremony and it wasan actual agreement between governments And Ithink that might have taken longer to happen if thestage had not been set by the first connection

Jennings So Madame Hu do you have somecomments on the battles these people fought to getthe Internet going

Hu The description of the early days when theInternet entered China may differentiate dependingon the different events the different individuals hadbeen experiencing at that time but the main streamis quite clear that the scientific research and inter-national exchange played the role of the engineAlso we should not leave out the High EnergyPhysics Institute of CAS with their partner theSLAC in Stanford University The earlier digitalcommunication between the latter partners tookplace even for 1 year ahead of the first email sentby Wang Yunfeng and Werner Zorn and theirteams to Germany via an X25 telecommunicationlink

Looking back to 1994 at that time my feelingwas the obstacles were not in the technology Be-cause the key person of our technology team Pro-fessor Qian Hualin and others told me that theyhad full success in the test with Sprint There wereno technical obstacles Everything is ready Justthe gate is still closed somehow So I remembervery clearly when I came to Dr Neal Lane theNSF Director at that time to ask for help That wasin the early April when I was in Washington DCas a member of the China delegation attending theUS-China Combined Committee Meeting on thecollaboration in Science and Technology betweenthe two countries Dr Neal Lane immediatelymade a chance for me to talk with Stephen WolffStephen just told me ldquoDonrsquot worry No problemYou will be connected to the Internetrdquo I was notvery sure about that I asked him is it that simpleHe said yes it is simple No contract no sign nodocument the only document we had providedbefore that was the AUP (Accepted Use PolicyAnd then after a few days I got the news from mycolleagues in China that the connection is done itgoes through smoothly Everything is OK Then Ithought ldquoOh Steve Wolff is really greatrdquo Thisman had a magic stick The magic stick pointedand the gate opened Is it that simple I guess it is

Jennings On what better note to end With all the hard work and all the battles at the

end of the day it took a little magic to make this fittogether and to forge the links to China to enablethe first email twenty years ago from China to therest of the world

Ladies and Gentlemen Panel thank you verymuch indeed Applause

Page 12

Transcribed from the video athttpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3204htmlSlightly edited by some of the participants

[Editorrsquos note The following is a news report onXinhuanet based on an intervew with WernerZorn Berlin Sept 19 2007]

ldquoAcross the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the worldrdquo

by Liming Wu(English translation by Virginia Zorn)

This is the first e-mail mesage sent fromBeijing abroad on Sept 20 1987 This also meansthat the internet era knocked on the door of China

Professor Werner Zorn who was then a com-puter science professor at the University Karlsruhein Germany and who sent this first email fromChina 20 years ago told the journalists when hewas interviewed by the Xinhuanet

In September 1987 Professor Zorn visitedBeijing for a scientific conference After four yearsof preparatory work and two weeks of extremelyhard tests the joint German-Chinese team success-fully connected the Beijing Institute of ComputerApplication (ICA) and the computing centre ofUniversity Karlsruhe On Sept 20 he made thedraft of this first e-mail and together with Profes-sor Yunfeng Wang successfully sent it to one ofthe computers at the University Karlsruhe

Prof Zorn who helped China to get intointernet remembered ldquoThe first response to themail came from an American computer scienceprofessor Larry Landweber Later on there weremore and more responses from all over the worldrdquo

Professor Zorn is known as the father of theInternet in Germany Germany entered the Interneton Aug 2 1984 with the first e-mail received byProf Zorn from CSNET In 2006 Zorn wasawarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts

Prof Zorn recalled that it was out of the simplewish to facilitate the communication between thecomputer science professionals to connect thecomputer networks from both countries A letter

required at that time at least eight days andtelephone or telegraph was extremely expensive

After the first success to help China to get intothe internet Prof Zorn continued to help Chinawith its development On Nov 28 1990 Prof Zornregistered CN domain name for China and set theprimary DNS server in University Karlsruhe Thisserver was handed over to China in 1994

Zorn said he did realise the epoch-makingmeaning of the first e-mail sent from China ldquoItwas a sensational eventrdquo But what the internetmeans today was out of his imagination at thattime

Twenty years later email has become the mostpopular communication media now China with162 million internet users is the second largestinternet country after USA The internet has be-come an indispensable part of life for many Chi-nese people and the internet technology is enjoyinga dramatic boom

Twenty years have passed Prof YunfengWang who worked together with Prof Zorn to getChina on the internet passed away ten years agoProf Zorn is now 64 years old and would retiresoon What comforts him is that the Chinese Peo-ple have not forgotten him Zorn said he often gotinvitations to visit China

On Sept 18 dozens of scholars worldwidegathered at the University of Potsdam inGermany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of theChinese internet Professor Qiheng Hu presented inthe name of the Chinese internet community acrystal award to Prof Zorn On the crystal award isinscribed

We hereby present our sincere appreciationto Professor Werner Zorn for your invalu-able support to Internetrsquos early developmentin China

Page 12

Transcribed from the video athttpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3204htmlSlightly edited by some of the participants

[Editorrsquos note The following is a news report onXinhuanet based on an intervew with WernerZorn Berlin Sept 19 2007]

ldquoAcross the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the worldrdquo

by Liming Wu(English translation by Virginia Zorn)

This is the first e-mail mesage sent fromBeijing abroad on Sept 20 1987 This also meansthat the internet era knocked on the door of China

Professor Werner Zorn who was then a com-puter science professor at the University Karlsruhein Germany and who sent this first email fromChina 20 years ago told the journalists when hewas interviewed by the Xinhuanet

In September 1987 Professor Zorn visitedBeijing for a scientific conference After four yearsof preparatory work and two weeks of extremelyhard tests the joint German-Chinese team success-fully connected the Beijing Institute of ComputerApplication (ICA) and the computing centre ofUniversity Karlsruhe On Sept 20 he made thedraft of this first e-mail and together with Profes-sor Yunfeng Wang successfully sent it to one ofthe computers at the University Karlsruhe

Prof Zorn who helped China to get intointernet remembered ldquoThe first response to themail came from an American computer scienceprofessor Larry Landweber Later on there weremore and more responses from all over the worldrdquo

Professor Zorn is known as the father of theInternet in Germany Germany entered the Interneton Aug 2 1984 with the first e-mail received byProf Zorn from CSNET In 2006 Zorn wasawarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts

Prof Zorn recalled that it was out of the simplewish to facilitate the communication between thecomputer science professionals to connect thecomputer networks from both countries A letter

required at that time at least eight days andtelephone or telegraph was extremely expensive

After the first success to help China to get intothe internet Prof Zorn continued to help Chinawith its development On Nov 28 1990 Prof Zornregistered CN domain name for China and set theprimary DNS server in University Karlsruhe Thisserver was handed over to China in 1994

Zorn said he did realise the epoch-makingmeaning of the first e-mail sent from China ldquoItwas a sensational eventrdquo But what the internetmeans today was out of his imagination at thattime

Twenty years later email has become the mostpopular communication media now China with162 million internet users is the second largestinternet country after USA The internet has be-come an indispensable part of life for many Chi-nese people and the internet technology is enjoyinga dramatic boom

Twenty years have passed Prof YunfengWang who worked together with Prof Zorn to getChina on the internet passed away ten years agoProf Zorn is now 64 years old and would retiresoon What comforts him is that the Chinese Peo-ple have not forgotten him Zorn said he often gotinvitations to visit China

On Sept 18 dozens of scholars worldwidegathered at the University of Potsdam inGermany to celebrate the 20th anniversary of theChinese internet Professor Qiheng Hu presented inthe name of the Chinese internet community acrystal award to Prof Zorn On the crystal award isinscribed

We hereby present our sincere appreciationto Professor Werner Zorn for your invalu-able support to Internetrsquos early developmentin China

Page 13

[Editorrsquos note The following is a speach given onSept 18 2007 at the event to commemorate the 20th

anniversary of the first email sent from China toGermany]

Cordial Thanks to OurFriends

by Qiheng HuInternet Society of China CNNIC

International collaborations in science andtechnology are the driving forces for computer net-working across country borders and facilitatedearly Internet development in China Among themthe collaborations of CANET of China withKarlsruhe University in Germany and the CSNETBITNET of the US contributed directly to the in-troduction of the Internet into China

China connected to CSNET and BITNET andthe first email sent from China to Germany

Professor Werner Zorn attended the firstCASCO Conference of 1983 in Beijing To reducethe cost of data transfer between scientists andmake the communication more effective ProfZorn thought of the possibility of computer con-nection with Chinese counterparts The major col-laborator was a team led by Professor Wang YuenFung of the Institute of Computer Application(ICA) China

In July 1985 Prof Zorn wrote a letter to theformer Chief Officer of Baden-Wuerttemberg andsuggested the program with budget application InAutumn 1985 the budget was approved

In 1987 the connection between Germany andChina had had some troubles Zorn asked for helpfrom the CSNET International Collaboration Divi-sion Leader Lawrence H Landweber In Septem-ber 1987 Zorn arrived at Beijing to test the connec-tion with the software CSNET-BS2000 which wasauthorized by Lawrence H Landweber November1987 the project for computer connection betweenChina and the USA suggested by ExecutiveChairman of CSNET David Farber and DrLandweber was approved by the NSF

With the support from a team at KarlsruheUniversity led by Prof Werner Zorn the group inthe Institute of Computer Application in Beijingled by Prof Wang Yuenfung and Dr LiChengjiong built up an email node in ICA and

successfully sent out an email on September 20 of1987 to Germany The email title was ldquoAcross theGreat Wall we can reach every corner in theworldrdquo

In November 1987 a Chinese delegation wasinvited to participate in the 6th international net-work workshop held in Princeton During the con-ference a congratulatory letter from NSF recogniz-ing the connection of China into the CSNET andBITNET of the US signed by Dr Stephen Wolffwas forwarded to the head of delegation Mr YangChuquan

Registration of the CCTLD cnIn October 1990 Prof Wang Yuen Fung on

behalf of the ICA authorized Dr Zorn to registerthe cn ccTLD at the InterNIC in name of ChineseComputer Network for Science and TechnologyCANET

Dr Zorn registered cn in 26 November 1990and the Administrative Liaison for ccTLD cn wasProf Qian Tianbai of the ICA

Starting from 1991 the DNS server for theccTLD cn had been resigned to University ofKarlsruhe through a trusteeship to Dr Zorn

On 21 of May 1994 CNNIC which is locatedin by the Chinese Academy of Sciences was estab-lished and authorized by Chinese Government tomove the ccTLD server for cn to China

China connected to the Internet April 1994In June 1992 at INETrsquo92 in Japan Prof Qian

Hualin of Chinese Academy of Sciences visited theNSF official who was responsible for the Interna-tional relations in the Division of Computer Net-works to make the first discussion on the issue ofChina connecting to the Internet

At INETrsquo93 of June 1993 Chinese participantsrepeated the request of connecting to the InternetAfter INETrsquo93 Prof Qian Hualin attended theCCIRN (Coordinating Committee for Interconti-nental Research Networking) that made a specialtopic in the program the issue of China connectingto the Internet The dominant response wasstrongly supportive

In April 1994 Vice President of the ChineseAcademy of Sciences Dr Hu Qiheng visited theNSF to meet with Dr Neal Lane and Dr StephenWolff appealing for the China connection to the

Page 14

Internet backbone The request was fully supportedby the NSF

On 20 of April 1994 China at last succeeded tomake a full-function connection onto the Internet

For all the support and help we received fromour overseas friends during the early days develop-ment of Internet in China today when the Internethas greatly contributed to the Chinese economyand social progress we feel deeply grateful and Iwould like to take this opportunity to extend ourcordial thanks to our friends

First of all Irsquod like to thank Prof Werner Zornand the HPI of Germany for providing this oppor-tunity to me to come here to express gratitude onbehalf of the Chinese Internet Community tofriends who have provided invaluable help andhave contributed to the early development of theInternet in ChinaOur sincere thanks go to Prof Werner Zorn Our sincere thanks go to Dr Stephen Wolff Our sincere thanks go to Dr LawrenceLandweberAlso we thank Dr Daniel Karrenberg and DrDennis Jenning for their support and contributionsto the early daysrsquo Internet in China

The Internet is changing the world also Chinaopening the door to the information society Wersquoregrateful to the Internet creators Wersquore grateful tothe world Internet community so many colleaguesfrom different corners of the world have providedtheir help and support for the Internet to develop inChina

[Editorrsquos note The following article is based on anemail message from Mdm Hu A fuller account ofldquoGrowth of the Internet in China since 1987rdquo canbe viewed at httpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3203html The slides for this presentationa r e a t h t t p w w w h p i u n i - p o t s d a m d e

fileadminhpiveranstaltungenchinaslides070919_S1_

2_HU_Internet_in_Chinapdf]

Early Steps Toward Chinaon the Internet

by Qiheng HuInternet Society of China CNNIC

The description of the early days when theInternet entered China may differentiate depending

on the different events the different individuals hadbeen experiencing at that time but the main streamis quite clear that the scientific research and inter-national exchange played the role of the engineThe essential motivation to connect to the Internetwas to decrease the cost of data and informationexchange between the collaborators eg the Insti-tute of Prof Wang Yunfeng and his team with theKarlsruhe University in Germany also the HighEnergy Physics Institute of the Chinese Academyof Sciences (CAS) with their partner the StanfordLinear Accelerator Center (SLAC) near San Fran-cisco The earlier digital communication betweenthe latter partners took place even for one yearahead of the first email sent by Wang Yunfeng toGermany via a X25 telecommunication link Asone of the key persons for the Internet entranceinto China Professor Qian Hualin told me both ofthose Institutes were connected to the world via theDECNet links The High Energy Physics Institute(HEPI) of CAS was linked to the Energy SciencesNetwork (ESnet) of the US Department of Energy(DOE) as the only partner from China side

Today we can say for sure that the very firsttrue Internet connection in China was implementedby the triangle network of the Zhongguancun AreaNational Computing and Networking Facility ofChina (NCFC) in April 1994 The NCFC was aWorld bank loan project aimed on the establish-ment of a supercomputer center shared by the re-search institutes of CAS in the ZhongguancunArea the Tsinghua and Beijing Universities I wasthe chairperson of the Decision-making Committeeof this project In 1993 the Committee took a deci-sion that was the pursuance of the researchers andteachers that we should try our best to link to theInternet The first demand was budget This deci-sion became feasible only because the MoST(Ministry of Science and Technology) and NSFC(National Science Foundation of China) made thefinancial support for the networking beyond theNCFC budget

The second issue is the possibility to have theacceptance from the US side To make this issuesolved efforts have been made through all possiblediversified channels by many people includingChinese and our friends from other countries Pro-fessor Qian Hualin and Ma Yinglin of CAS partici-pated in some of these activities As Prof Qiantold me in June 1992 at the INETrsquo92 in Japan he

Page 14

Internet backbone The request was fully supportedby the NSF

On 20 of April 1994 China at last succeeded tomake a full-function connection onto the Internet

For all the support and help we received fromour overseas friends during the early days develop-ment of Internet in China today when the Internethas greatly contributed to the Chinese economyand social progress we feel deeply grateful and Iwould like to take this opportunity to extend ourcordial thanks to our friends

First of all Irsquod like to thank Prof Werner Zornand the HPI of Germany for providing this oppor-tunity to me to come here to express gratitude onbehalf of the Chinese Internet Community tofriends who have provided invaluable help andhave contributed to the early development of theInternet in ChinaOur sincere thanks go to Prof Werner Zorn Our sincere thanks go to Dr Stephen Wolff Our sincere thanks go to Dr LawrenceLandweberAlso we thank Dr Daniel Karrenberg and DrDennis Jenning for their support and contributionsto the early daysrsquo Internet in China

The Internet is changing the world also Chinaopening the door to the information society Wersquoregrateful to the Internet creators Wersquore grateful tothe world Internet community so many colleaguesfrom different corners of the world have providedtheir help and support for the Internet to develop inChina

[Editorrsquos note The following article is based on anemail message from Mdm Hu A fuller account ofldquoGrowth of the Internet in China since 1987rdquo canbe viewed at httpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3203html The slides for this presentationa r e a t h t t p w w w h p i u n i - p o t s d a m d e

fileadminhpiveranstaltungenchinaslides070919_S1_

2_HU_Internet_in_Chinapdf]

Early Steps Toward Chinaon the Internet

by Qiheng HuInternet Society of China CNNIC

The description of the early days when theInternet entered China may differentiate depending

on the different events the different individuals hadbeen experiencing at that time but the main streamis quite clear that the scientific research and inter-national exchange played the role of the engineThe essential motivation to connect to the Internetwas to decrease the cost of data and informationexchange between the collaborators eg the Insti-tute of Prof Wang Yunfeng and his team with theKarlsruhe University in Germany also the HighEnergy Physics Institute of the Chinese Academyof Sciences (CAS) with their partner the StanfordLinear Accelerator Center (SLAC) near San Fran-cisco The earlier digital communication betweenthe latter partners took place even for one yearahead of the first email sent by Wang Yunfeng toGermany via a X25 telecommunication link Asone of the key persons for the Internet entranceinto China Professor Qian Hualin told me both ofthose Institutes were connected to the world via theDECNet links The High Energy Physics Institute(HEPI) of CAS was linked to the Energy SciencesNetwork (ESnet) of the US Department of Energy(DOE) as the only partner from China side

Today we can say for sure that the very firsttrue Internet connection in China was implementedby the triangle network of the Zhongguancun AreaNational Computing and Networking Facility ofChina (NCFC) in April 1994 The NCFC was aWorld bank loan project aimed on the establish-ment of a supercomputer center shared by the re-search institutes of CAS in the ZhongguancunArea the Tsinghua and Beijing Universities I wasthe chairperson of the Decision-making Committeeof this project In 1993 the Committee took a deci-sion that was the pursuance of the researchers andteachers that we should try our best to link to theInternet The first demand was budget This deci-sion became feasible only because the MoST(Ministry of Science and Technology) and NSFC(National Science Foundation of China) made thefinancial support for the networking beyond theNCFC budget

The second issue is the possibility to have theacceptance from the US side To make this issuesolved efforts have been made through all possiblediversified channels by many people includingChinese and our friends from other countries Pro-fessor Qian Hualin and Ma Yinglin of CAS partici-pated in some of these activities As Prof Qiantold me in June 1992 at the INETrsquo92 in Japan he

Page 15

had the first talk on this topic with Mr StevenGoldstein (at that time he was responsible for theinternational connections of US NSFNET) whichwas followed by many talks with him later in otherchances Qian considered the most important eventthe meeting convened after INETrsquo93 Qian hadtalked with Steven Goldstein Vint Cerf and DavidFarber etc to seek for the understanding of thepursuance being connected into the Internet Pro-fessor Richard Hetherington director of Computerand Communication Department of Missouri-Kan-sas University was among the foreign friends whosupported our pursuance During that time QianHualin and others had many discussions withSprint (authorized by NSFNET for internationalconnection) on the technical details After theINETrsquo93 in Bodega Bay San Francisco theCCIRN (Cooperation and Coordination for Inter-national Research Networks) took place The issueof the China connection was listed in the agendaAs Qian Hualin remembered all speakerssupported the acceptance of China ProfessorKilnam Chon at that time the chairman of AP-CCIRN provided a ride to Qian Hualin to attendthis important meeting

As the technical team leader from China sideQian Hualin had gotten information in early 1994that China will be connected The test of the satel-lite channel started in March 1994 and in April 201994 implemented the full-functional connectionto the Internet His feeling is that the final solutionof the issue was somehow related with the US-China Combined Committee Meeting on the col-laboration in Science and Technology between thetwo countries The US side may have wanted toenhance the friendly atmosphere for this meeting

At that time my feeling was the obstacles werenot in the technology Because the technologyteam Professor Qian and others told me that theyhad full success in the test with Sprint There wereno technical obstacles Everything is ready Justthe gate is still closed somehow So I remembervery clearly when I come up to Dr Neal Lane theNSF Director at that time to ask for help That wasin the early April when I was in Washington DCas a member of the China delegation attending theUS-China Combined Committee Meeting on thecollaboration in Science and Technology betweenthe two countries Dr Neal Lane immediatelymade a chance for me to talk with Stephen Wolff

Stephen just told me ldquoDonrsquot worry No problemYou will be connected to the Internetrdquo I was notvery sure about that I asked him is it that simpleHe said yes it is simple No contract no signingno document The only document we had beforethat was the AUP (Accepted Use Policy) And thenafter a few days I got the news from my colleaguesin China that the connection is done It goesthrough smoothly Everything is OK Then Ithought ldquoOh Stephen Wolff is really greatrdquo Thisman had a magic stick The magic stick pointedand the gate opened Is it that simple I guess it is

Afterward later in 1994 with the help of ProfZorn we moved the ldquocnrdquo server back to Chinafrom Karsruhe University and in 1997 the CNNICwas approved by Chinese governmental authorityThe Chinese people online started to grow fast InMay 2001 we established the Internet Society ofChina (ISC) and to our great honor we success-fully hosted the 2002 ISOC Conference inShanghai

[Editorrsquos note The following talk was presented inPotsdam on Sept 19 2007 A video of the presen-tation can be viewed at httpwwwtele-taskdepage50_lecture3204htmlThe slides from this presentation can be seen athttpwwwhpiuni-potsdamdefileadminhpi-veranstaltungenchinaslides070919_S3b_2_hauben_netizenmovementpdf]

Netizens and the New News

The Emergence of Netizens andNetizen Journalism

by Ronda Hauben

Part I ndash IntroductionI am happy to be here today and to have this

chance to contribute to this conference to celebratethe 20 anniversary of the first international emailth

sent from China to Germany and the collaborationof researchers that made this early email communi-cation possible

I have been asked to speak about the Netizenmovement and its impact The title of my talk isldquoNetizens and the New News The Emergence ofNetizens and Netizen Journalismrdquo

Page 16

Part II ndash About NetizensFirst I want to provide some background

In 1992-1993 a college student who had gottenaccess to the Net wondered what the impact of theNet would be

The student decided to do his research usingthe Net itself He sent out several sets of questionsand received many responses Studying theresponses he realized something new was devel-oping something not expected What was develop-ing was a sense among many of the people whowrote to him that the Internet was making a differ-ence in their lives and that the communication itmade possible with others around the world wasimportant

The student discovered that there were usersonline who not only cared for how the Internetcould help them with their purposes but whowanted the Internet to continue to spread andthrive so that more and more people around theworld would have access to it

He had seen the word lsquonetcitizenrsquo referred toonline Thinking about the social concern he hadfound among those who wrote him and about thenon-geographical character of a net based form ofcitizenship he contracted lsquonetcitizenrsquo into theword lsquonetizenrsquo Netizen has come to reflect theonline social identity he discovered doing his re-search

The student wrote a paper describing hisresearch and the many responses he had receivedThe paper was titled ldquoThe Net and Netizens TheImpact the Net has on Peoplersquos Livesrdquo Thisresearch was done in the early to mid 1990s just atthe time that the Internet was spreading to coun-tries and networks around the world

The student posted his paper on several of thediscussion forums known as Usenet newsgroupsand on several Internet mailing lists on July 61993 It was posted in four parts under the titleldquoCommon Sense The Net and Netizens the Im-pact the Net is having on peoplersquos livesrdquo Peoplearound the world found his article and helped tospread it to others The term netizen quicklyspread not only in the online world but soon itwas appearing in newspapers and other publica-tions offline The student did other research andposted his articles online

In January 1994 several of the articles aboutnetizens and about the history of the Net were col-

lected into a book to be available via file transferprotocol (ftp) to anyone online The title of thebook was ldquoNetizens and the Wonderful World ofthe Netrdquo Then in 1997 the book titled NetizensOn the History and Impact of Usenet and theInternet was published in a print edition in Englishand soon afterwards in a Japanese translation

The concept and consciousness of oneself as anetizen has continued to spread around the world Iwant to mention a few of the more striking earlyexamples

A netizen from Ireland put the online book intohtml to help it to spread more widely

A review of the book was done by a Romanianresearcher He recognized that netizenship is a newdevelopment and acts as a catalyst for the develop-ment of ever more advanced information technol-ogy

In 1995 the student was invited to speak at aconference about netizens and communitynetworks in Beppu Bay on Kyushu Island in JapanThe conference was held by the Coara Communitynetwork

A Japanese sociologist gathered a series of arti-cles into a book in Japanese titled ldquoThe Age ofNetizensrdquo The book begins with a chapter on thebirth of the netizen

Also in the mid 1990s a Polish researcher wasdoing research connected with the European Unionto try to determine what form of citizenship wouldbe appropriate for the EU Looking for a modelthat might be helpful toward understanding how todevelop a European-wide form of citizenship Hefound the articles about netizens online He recom-mended to EU officials that they would do well toconsider the model of netizenship as a model for abroader than national but also a participatory formof citizenship

Among other notable events showing the im-pact of netizens around the world are

A Netizen Association formed in Iceland tokeep the price of the Net affordable

A lexicographer in Israel who wrote a dictio-nary definition for a Hebrew dictionary makingcertain that she described a netizen as one whocontributes to the Net

A Congressman in the US who introduced abill into the US House of Representatives calledthe Netizen Protection Act to penalize anyone sentspam on the Internet

Page 17

While the word lsquonetizenrsquo like the wordlsquocitizenrsquo has come to have many meanings thestudent who had discovered the emergence ofnetizens felt it was important to distinguishbetween the more general usage that the media haspromoted that anyone online is a netizen and theusage the student had introduced which reservedthe title lsquonetizenrsquo for a social identity

In a talk he gave in Japan in 1995 the studentexplained

ldquoNetizens are not just anyone who comes on-line Netizens are especially not people whocome online for individual gain or profit Theyare not people who come to the Net thinking itis a service Rather they are people who under-stand it takes effort and action on each and ev-eryonersquos part to make the Net a regenerativeand vibrant community and resource Netizensare people who decide to devote time and ef-fort into making the Net this new part of ourworld a better placerdquo (Talk given at the Hyper-

network rsquo95 Beppu Bay Conference in Japan)

The second usage of netizens is the usage I amreferring to as well

In his article ldquoThe Net and the Netizensrdquo thestudent proposed that the Net ldquogives the power ofthe reporter to the Netizenrdquo I want to look today atthis particular aspect of netizen development byconsidering some interesting examples from SouthKorea Germany the US and China

III ndash South Korea and the Netizens MovementIn South Korea over 80 of the population

have access to high speed Internet Along with thespread of high speed Internet access is the develop-ment of netizenship among the Korean populationDuring a recent trip to Seoul I asked a number ofdifferent people that I met if they are netizensThey all responded yes or ldquoI hope sordquo

In South Korea the overwhelming influence ofthe three (3) major newspapers on politics has ledto a movement opposing this influence known asthe ldquoanti-Chosun movementrdquo (Chosun Ilbo is thename of the largest most influential newspaper inSouth Korea)

Among the developments of this movementwas the creation of an alternative newspaper calledOhmyNews by Oh Yeon Ho in February 2000 MrOh had been a student activist and became a jour-nalist for an alternative monthly magazine He

saw however that the alternative press monthlywas not able to effectively challenge the influenceover politics exerted by the mainstream conserva-tive media in South Korea With some funds heand a few other activist business people were ableto raise he began the online daily newspaperOhmyNews

Mr Oh felt that some of the power of the con-servative mainstream media came from the factthat they were able to set the standards for hownews was produced distributed and consumed Hewas intent on challenging that power and reshapinghow and what standards were set for the news Thegoal that OhmyNews set for itself was to challengethe great power of the mainstream news mediaover news production distribution and consump-tion

He had limited financial means when he startedOhmyNews so he began with a staff of only four(4) reporters

1) Selection and Concentration of ArticlesTo make the most use of this small staff he

decided to focus on carefully chosen issues Notonly would there be carefully selected issues butthere would then be several articles on these issuesso they could have the greatest possible impact 2) Targeting Audience

The staff of OhmyNews decided to aim theircoverage of issues toward the young Internetgeneration toward progressives and activists andtoward other reporters3) Challenge how standards are set and what theyare

One of the innovations made by Mr Oh was towelcome articles not only from the staff of theyoung newspaper but also from what he calledldquocitizen reportersrdquo or ldquocitizen journalistsrdquo

ldquoEvery citizen is a reporterrdquo was a motto ofthe young newspaper as they didnrsquot regard jour-nalists as some exotic species To be a reporter wasnot some privilege to be reserved for the fewRather those who had news to share had the basisto be journalists Referring to citizen journalists asldquonews guerrillasrdquo OhmyNews explains that

The dictionary definition of guerrilla is ldquoamember of a small non-regular armed forces whodisrupt the rear positions of the enemyrdquo

One of the reasons for calling citizen journal-ists ldquonews guerrillasrdquo OhmyNews explains is that

Page 18

it found that citizen journalists would ldquopost newsfrom perspectives uniquely their own not those ofthe conservative establishmentrdquo

This viewpoint the viewpoint challenging theconservative establishment was an important in-sight that OhmyNews had about the kinds of sub-missions it was interested in for its newspapersubmissions from those who were not part of theirstaff but whose writing became a significant con-tribution to OhmyNews

Articles submitted by citizen journalists wouldbe fact checked edited and if they were used inOhmyNews a small fee would be paid for them

Articles could include the views of theirauthors as long as the facts were accurate In thisway OhmyNews was changing both who were con-sidered as journalists able to produce the news andwhat form articles would take

Basing itself mainly on the Internet to distrib-ute the news OhmyNews was also changing theform of news distribution

(Once a week a print edition was producedfrom among the articles that appeared in the onlineedition during the week There was a need to pro-duce a print edition in order to be considered anewspaper under the South Korean newspaperlaw)

The long term strategy of OhmyNews was tocreate a daily Internet based newspaper superior tothe most powerful South Korean newspaper at thetime (the digital version of Chosun Ilbo the DigitalChosun)

In its short seven year existence there havebeen a number of instances when OhmyNews suc-ceeded in having an important impact on politics inSouth Korea A few such instances are1) Helping to build what became large candlelightdemonstrations against the agreement governingthe relations between the US government andSouth Korea This agreement is known as the Sta-tus of Forces Agreement (The US has approxi-mately 30000 troops in South Korea)2) Helping to build the campaign for the presi-dency of South Korea for a political outsider RohMoo-hyun in Nov-Dec 20023) Helping to bring to public attention the death ofa draftee from stomach cancer because of poormedical treatment in the military Articles in OMNhelped to expose the problem and put pressure on

the South Korean government to change the conditions4) Helping to create a climate favorable to the de-velopment of online publications

IV Telepolis ndash the Online MagazineIn Germany a different form of online journal-

ism has developed One influential example isTelepolis an online magazine created in March1996 to focus on Internet culture The onlinemagazine is part of the Heise publication networkTelepolis which celebrated its 10 anniversary inth

2006 has a small staff and also accepts articlesfrom freelancers for which it pays a modest fee Itpublishes several new articles every day on its website and also has an area where there is often livelyonline discussion about the articles which haveappeared The articles are mainly in Germanthough some English articles are published as well

Describing Telepolis in 1997 David Hudsonwrites

ldquoOver eight hundred articles are up (online)many of them in English and people arereading them The number of pageviews is ru-mored to rival that of some sites put up bywell-established magazines SohellipTelepolis hasactually done quite a service for some of themore out of the way ideas that might not other-wise have become a part of European digitalculturerdquo (Rewired

httpwwwrewiredcom971010html)

One example of what I consider Telepolisrsquosimportant achievements is the fact that the day af-ter the Sept 11 2001 attacks on the World TradeCenter a series of articles began in Telepolis ques-tioning how quickly the US government claimedit knew the source of the attacks despite the factthat no preparations had been made to prevent theattacks A lively discussion ensued in response tothe articles on Telepolis Serious questions wereraised comparing what happened on Sept 11 andthe ensuing attacks by the US government oncivil liberties using Sept 11 as a pretext Compari-sons were considered and debated comparing Sept11 and the response of the US government withwhat happened in Germany with the Reistag fireand the rise of fascism in the 1930s Describing theresponse he received to his articles in Telepolis thejournalist Mathias Broeckers writes

ldquoNever before in my 20 years as a journalistand author of more than 500 newspaper and

Page 17

While the word lsquonetizenrsquo like the wordlsquocitizenrsquo has come to have many meanings thestudent who had discovered the emergence ofnetizens felt it was important to distinguishbetween the more general usage that the media haspromoted that anyone online is a netizen and theusage the student had introduced which reservedthe title lsquonetizenrsquo for a social identity

In a talk he gave in Japan in 1995 the studentexplained

ldquoNetizens are not just anyone who comes on-line Netizens are especially not people whocome online for individual gain or profit Theyare not people who come to the Net thinking itis a service Rather they are people who under-stand it takes effort and action on each and ev-eryonersquos part to make the Net a regenerativeand vibrant community and resource Netizensare people who decide to devote time and ef-fort into making the Net this new part of ourworld a better placerdquo (Talk given at the Hyper-

network rsquo95 Beppu Bay Conference in Japan)

The second usage of netizens is the usage I amreferring to as well

In his article ldquoThe Net and the Netizensrdquo thestudent proposed that the Net ldquogives the power ofthe reporter to the Netizenrdquo I want to look today atthis particular aspect of netizen development byconsidering some interesting examples from SouthKorea Germany the US and China

III ndash South Korea and the Netizens MovementIn South Korea over 80 of the population

have access to high speed Internet Along with thespread of high speed Internet access is the develop-ment of netizenship among the Korean populationDuring a recent trip to Seoul I asked a number ofdifferent people that I met if they are netizensThey all responded yes or ldquoI hope sordquo

In South Korea the overwhelming influence ofthe three (3) major newspapers on politics has ledto a movement opposing this influence known asthe ldquoanti-Chosun movementrdquo (Chosun Ilbo is thename of the largest most influential newspaper inSouth Korea)

Among the developments of this movementwas the creation of an alternative newspaper calledOhmyNews by Oh Yeon Ho in February 2000 MrOh had been a student activist and became a jour-nalist for an alternative monthly magazine He

saw however that the alternative press monthlywas not able to effectively challenge the influenceover politics exerted by the mainstream conserva-tive media in South Korea With some funds heand a few other activist business people were ableto raise he began the online daily newspaperOhmyNews

Mr Oh felt that some of the power of the con-servative mainstream media came from the factthat they were able to set the standards for hownews was produced distributed and consumed Hewas intent on challenging that power and reshapinghow and what standards were set for the news Thegoal that OhmyNews set for itself was to challengethe great power of the mainstream news mediaover news production distribution and consump-tion

He had limited financial means when he startedOhmyNews so he began with a staff of only four(4) reporters

1) Selection and Concentration of ArticlesTo make the most use of this small staff he

decided to focus on carefully chosen issues Notonly would there be carefully selected issues butthere would then be several articles on these issuesso they could have the greatest possible impact 2) Targeting Audience

The staff of OhmyNews decided to aim theircoverage of issues toward the young Internetgeneration toward progressives and activists andtoward other reporters3) Challenge how standards are set and what theyare

One of the innovations made by Mr Oh was towelcome articles not only from the staff of theyoung newspaper but also from what he calledldquocitizen reportersrdquo or ldquocitizen journalistsrdquo

ldquoEvery citizen is a reporterrdquo was a motto ofthe young newspaper as they didnrsquot regard jour-nalists as some exotic species To be a reporter wasnot some privilege to be reserved for the fewRather those who had news to share had the basisto be journalists Referring to citizen journalists asldquonews guerrillasrdquo OhmyNews explains that

The dictionary definition of guerrilla is ldquoamember of a small non-regular armed forces whodisrupt the rear positions of the enemyrdquo

One of the reasons for calling citizen journal-ists ldquonews guerrillasrdquo OhmyNews explains is that

Page 18

it found that citizen journalists would ldquopost newsfrom perspectives uniquely their own not those ofthe conservative establishmentrdquo

This viewpoint the viewpoint challenging theconservative establishment was an important in-sight that OhmyNews had about the kinds of sub-missions it was interested in for its newspapersubmissions from those who were not part of theirstaff but whose writing became a significant con-tribution to OhmyNews

Articles submitted by citizen journalists wouldbe fact checked edited and if they were used inOhmyNews a small fee would be paid for them

Articles could include the views of theirauthors as long as the facts were accurate In thisway OhmyNews was changing both who were con-sidered as journalists able to produce the news andwhat form articles would take

Basing itself mainly on the Internet to distrib-ute the news OhmyNews was also changing theform of news distribution

(Once a week a print edition was producedfrom among the articles that appeared in the onlineedition during the week There was a need to pro-duce a print edition in order to be considered anewspaper under the South Korean newspaperlaw)

The long term strategy of OhmyNews was tocreate a daily Internet based newspaper superior tothe most powerful South Korean newspaper at thetime (the digital version of Chosun Ilbo the DigitalChosun)

In its short seven year existence there havebeen a number of instances when OhmyNews suc-ceeded in having an important impact on politics inSouth Korea A few such instances are1) Helping to build what became large candlelightdemonstrations against the agreement governingthe relations between the US government andSouth Korea This agreement is known as the Sta-tus of Forces Agreement (The US has approxi-mately 30000 troops in South Korea)2) Helping to build the campaign for the presi-dency of South Korea for a political outsider RohMoo-hyun in Nov-Dec 20023) Helping to bring to public attention the death ofa draftee from stomach cancer because of poormedical treatment in the military Articles in OMNhelped to expose the problem and put pressure on

the South Korean government to change the conditions4) Helping to create a climate favorable to the de-velopment of online publications

IV Telepolis ndash the Online MagazineIn Germany a different form of online journal-

ism has developed One influential example isTelepolis an online magazine created in March1996 to focus on Internet culture The onlinemagazine is part of the Heise publication networkTelepolis which celebrated its 10 anniversary inth

2006 has a small staff and also accepts articlesfrom freelancers for which it pays a modest fee Itpublishes several new articles every day on its website and also has an area where there is often livelyonline discussion about the articles which haveappeared The articles are mainly in Germanthough some English articles are published as well

Describing Telepolis in 1997 David Hudsonwrites

ldquoOver eight hundred articles are up (online)many of them in English and people arereading them The number of pageviews is ru-mored to rival that of some sites put up bywell-established magazines SohellipTelepolis hasactually done quite a service for some of themore out of the way ideas that might not other-wise have become a part of European digitalculturerdquo (Rewired

httpwwwrewiredcom971010html)

One example of what I consider Telepolisrsquosimportant achievements is the fact that the day af-ter the Sept 11 2001 attacks on the World TradeCenter a series of articles began in Telepolis ques-tioning how quickly the US government claimedit knew the source of the attacks despite the factthat no preparations had been made to prevent theattacks A lively discussion ensued in response tothe articles on Telepolis Serious questions wereraised comparing what happened on Sept 11 andthe ensuing attacks by the US government oncivil liberties using Sept 11 as a pretext Compari-sons were considered and debated comparing Sept11 and the response of the US government withwhat happened in Germany with the Reistag fireand the rise of fascism in the 1930s Describing theresponse he received to his articles in Telepolis thejournalist Mathias Broeckers writes

ldquoNever before in my 20 years as a journalistand author of more than 500 newspaper and

Page 18

it found that citizen journalists would ldquopost newsfrom perspectives uniquely their own not those ofthe conservative establishmentrdquo

This viewpoint the viewpoint challenging theconservative establishment was an important in-sight that OhmyNews had about the kinds of sub-missions it was interested in for its newspapersubmissions from those who were not part of theirstaff but whose writing became a significant con-tribution to OhmyNews

Articles submitted by citizen journalists wouldbe fact checked edited and if they were used inOhmyNews a small fee would be paid for them

Articles could include the views of theirauthors as long as the facts were accurate In thisway OhmyNews was changing both who were con-sidered as journalists able to produce the news andwhat form articles would take

Basing itself mainly on the Internet to distrib-ute the news OhmyNews was also changing theform of news distribution

(Once a week a print edition was producedfrom among the articles that appeared in the onlineedition during the week There was a need to pro-duce a print edition in order to be considered anewspaper under the South Korean newspaperlaw)

The long term strategy of OhmyNews was tocreate a daily Internet based newspaper superior tothe most powerful South Korean newspaper at thetime (the digital version of Chosun Ilbo the DigitalChosun)

In its short seven year existence there havebeen a number of instances when OhmyNews suc-ceeded in having an important impact on politics inSouth Korea A few such instances are1) Helping to build what became large candlelightdemonstrations against the agreement governingthe relations between the US government andSouth Korea This agreement is known as the Sta-tus of Forces Agreement (The US has approxi-mately 30000 troops in South Korea)2) Helping to build the campaign for the presi-dency of South Korea for a political outsider RohMoo-hyun in Nov-Dec 20023) Helping to bring to public attention the death ofa draftee from stomach cancer because of poormedical treatment in the military Articles in OMNhelped to expose the problem and put pressure on

the South Korean government to change the conditions4) Helping to create a climate favorable to the de-velopment of online publications

IV Telepolis ndash the Online MagazineIn Germany a different form of online journal-

ism has developed One influential example isTelepolis an online magazine created in March1996 to focus on Internet culture The onlinemagazine is part of the Heise publication networkTelepolis which celebrated its 10 anniversary inth

2006 has a small staff and also accepts articlesfrom freelancers for which it pays a modest fee Itpublishes several new articles every day on its website and also has an area where there is often livelyonline discussion about the articles which haveappeared The articles are mainly in Germanthough some English articles are published as well

Describing Telepolis in 1997 David Hudsonwrites

ldquoOver eight hundred articles are up (online)many of them in English and people arereading them The number of pageviews is ru-mored to rival that of some sites put up bywell-established magazines SohellipTelepolis hasactually done quite a service for some of themore out of the way ideas that might not other-wise have become a part of European digitalculturerdquo (Rewired

httpwwwrewiredcom971010html)

One example of what I consider Telepolisrsquosimportant achievements is the fact that the day af-ter the Sept 11 2001 attacks on the World TradeCenter a series of articles began in Telepolis ques-tioning how quickly the US government claimedit knew the source of the attacks despite the factthat no preparations had been made to prevent theattacks A lively discussion ensued in response tothe articles on Telepolis Serious questions wereraised comparing what happened on Sept 11 andthe ensuing attacks by the US government oncivil liberties using Sept 11 as a pretext Compari-sons were considered and debated comparing Sept11 and the response of the US government withwhat happened in Germany with the Reistag fireand the rise of fascism in the 1930s Describing theresponse he received to his articles in Telepolis thejournalist Mathias Broeckers writes

ldquoNever before in my 20 years as a journalistand author of more than 500 newspaper and

Page 19

radio pieces have I had a greater response thanto the articles on the World Trade Center seriesalthough they were only published on theInternet Although I reckon itrsquos rather becausethey were only to be found in the Internet mag-azine Telepolis and soon after on thousands ofWeb sites and forums everywhere on theInternet that they achieved this level ofresponse and credibilityrdquo (Conspiracies Conspir-

acy Theories and the Secrets of 911 Progress Press

June 2006)

Similarly before the US invasion of Iraq Iwrote an article for Telepolis about the largedemonstration held in New York City on SaturdayFebruary 15 2003 In the article I proposed thatthe demonstration would have been even larger butfor a number of obstacles the US government putin the path of those wanting to protest the US in-vading Iraq A significant discussion among thereaders of Telepolis followed in which the issuesraised in the article were carefully examined andother sources used to fact check the article and tocompare the view I presented with that whichappeared in the more mainstream press

V- Blogs in the USThere is no US online publication equivalent

to OhmyNews in South Korea or Telepolis inGermany There are a number of blogs which of-ten challenge the reporting of the mainstream me-dia in the US or which respond often critically toUS government policy and actions

One blog I have found particularly interestingis the blog ldquoChina Mattersrdquo

The author of the blog is anonymous using thename ldquoChina Handrdquo He introduces his blog byexplaining that US policy on China is very impor-tant yet there is relatively little information pre-sented about China to the public in the US

China Hand writes ldquoAmericarsquos China policyevolves with relatively little public informationinsight or debate In the Internet age thatrsquos not de-sirable or justifiable So China Matters The pur-pose of this website is to provide objective author-itative information and to comment on mattersconcerning the Peoplersquos Republic of Chinardquo

An important role the China Matters blogplayed recently was to help provide informationabout the US Treasury Departmentrsquos actions to

freeze North Korean funds in a bank in MacauChina the Banco Delta Asia (BDA) bank

To fill in some background in September2005 an agreement was reached to serve as afoundation for negotiations among the six coun-tries negotiating a peace agreement for the KoreanPeninsula Shortly afterwards the US governmentannounced that it had taken an action under theUS Patriot Act to freeze $25 million of North Ko-rean funds held in a bank in Macau China Thisaction stalled any continuation of the negotiationsuntil the money would be released and returned toNorth Korea via the banking system

The China Matters blog posted documentsfrom the owner of the bank in China demonstratingthat no proof had been presented to justify the USgovernmentrsquos actions The publication of thesedocuments made it possible for of the publicationsto carry articles so that a spotlight was focused onthe problem The problem was then able to beresolved The money was released to North Koreapaving the way for the resumption of the Six-PartyTalks

VI ndash Netizen journalism in ChinaChina like the US doesnrsquot appear to have an

online newspaper or magazine like OhmyNews orlike Telepolis There are however a number ofactive online forums and blogs

Perhaps one of the most well known recentactivities of Chinese bloggers is known as ldquotheMost Awesome Nail Houserdquo saga

A nail house according to an article inOhmyNews International is the name given by realestate developers to describe the building of anowner who opposes moving even when his prop-erty is slated for demolition

This past February a blogger posted a photo-graph of one such building on the Internet Thepicture spread around the Internet The buildingwas owned by Yang Wu and his wife Wu Ping Itwas the building where they had lived and had asmall restaurant The nail house was located onnumber 17 Hexing Road Yangjiaping Changqing

Real estate developers planned to build a shop-ping center on that spot and had successfully ac-quired all the surrounding buildings Yang Wu andhis wife however were determined to resist untiltheir demand for what they felt was fair compensa-tion was met

Page 20

In September 2004 demolition of the sur-rounding buildings began and by February 2007only Yangrsquos building remained The developers cutoff the water and electricity even though this wasillegal

The story spread not only over the blogs butsoon also in the Chinese media At one point how-ever the story was not being reported in the Chi-nese press A blogger from Hunan Zola Zhouwrote on his blog ldquoI realize this is a one-timechance and so from far far away I came toChangqing to conduct a thorough investigation inan attempt to understand a variety of viewpointsrdquo

On his blog Zola reports that he took a trainand arrived two days later at the Changqing trainstation On his way to the nail house he stopped tohave rice noodles and asked the shop owner whathe thought of the nail house saga Along the wayhe spoke to other people he met He reported onthe variety of views of the people he met on hisblog Some of those he spoke with supported YangWu and Wu Ping Others felt Yang Wu and WuPing were asking for a lot of money (20 millionRMB) and that the developer was justified in re-fusing to pay such an outlandish amount Anotherperson told Zola that Yang Wu was only asking forthe ability to be relocated to a comparable placeand that the developer was offering too little forthe property

After arriving in Changqing Zola reports onhis blog that he bought the newspapers and lookedto see if there was any news that day about the NailHouse saga He reports he didnrsquot find any cover-age though he was told there may have been somein the paper from the previous day

One of the surprises for Zola in Changqing wasto find that other people who were losing theirhomes and businesses had gathered around theNail House hoping to find reporters to cover theirstruggles against developers

One such person offered Zola some money tohelp with the young bloggerrsquos expenses ldquoIrsquod nevercome across a situation like this beforerdquo he writesldquoand never thought to take money from people Irsquodhelp by writing about so I firmly said I didnrsquot wantit saying I only came to help him out of a sense ofjustice and that it might not necessarily prove suc-cessfulrdquo Zola explains that he wondered if accept-ing the money ldquowould lead me to stray further andfurther from my emerging sense of justicerdquo Even-

tually he let the person buy him lunch and later heaccepted money to be able to stay in a hotel roomfor a few days to continue to cover the story on hisblog Also Zola eventually asked Yang Wursquos wifeWu Ping what her demand of the developer is Heranswer he writes is ldquoI donrsquot want money What Iwant is a place of the same size anywhere in thisareardquo

Zola had heard a rumor that Wu Ping couldhold out for her demands to be met by the develop-ers because her father was a delegate for the Na-tional Peoplersquos Congress

Zola asked Wu Ping if her father is a delegatefor the National Peoplersquos Congress Wu Pingresponded ldquoNordquo her father wasnrsquot a delegate Shehad had some background however reading lawbooks and had had the experience of going througha law suit which she won But Wu Ping did notwant a law suit against the developer because shesaid that ldquoA lawsuit goes on for three to five yearsI may win the law suit but I end up losing moneyrdquo

In April the Awesome Nail House wasdemolished

In preparing my talk for today I sent Zolaemail asking a few questions I asked him what theoutcome was of the Nail House struggle He saidthat Yang Wu and Wu Ping were given anotherhouse and 900000 RMB for what they lost duringthe time they couldnrsquot operate their restaurant

I also asked him ldquoDo you consider yourself anetizen Can you say whyrdquo He answered ldquoYes Ido Because I read news from Internet Makefriends from Internet communicate with friends byInternet write a blog at the Internetrdquo

Another example of netizen activity on the Netin China is the story that Xin Yahua posted aboutyoung people in the provinces of Shanxi andHenan being kidnapped and then subjected to slavelabor working conditions Families reported thedisappearance of young people in the vicinity ofthe Zhengzhou Railway Station bus stations ornearby roads A discovery was made that a numberof young people had been abducted and then soldfor 500 yuan (about $62) to be used as slave laborfor illegal brick kilns operating in Shanxi

On the evening of June 5 2007 a postappeared on the online forum at ldquoDahe Netrdquowhich attracted much attention and many pageviews

Page 21

The post appeared as an open letter from 400fathers of abducted children The letter describedhow when the fathers went to the local governmentto ask for help they were turned away with theexcuse given that the kilns where the slave laborconditions were being practiced were in a differ-ent police jurisdiction from where the abductionshad taken place ldquoHenan and Shanxi police passthe buck back and forthrdquo the letter explainedldquoWho can rescue themrdquo the letter asked ldquoWith thegovernments of Henan and Shanxi passing thebuck to each other whom should we ask for helpThis is extremely urgent and concerns the life anddeath of our children Who can help usrdquo

Xin Yanhua a 32 year old woman who was theaunt of one of the abducted young people wrotethe letter She originally posted it under an anony-mous name (ldquoCentral Plain Old Pirdquo) Her nephewhad been abducted but then rescued and returnedhome by some of the fathers looking for their ownchildren She was grateful to those who found hernephew and wanted to find a way to express hergratitude Originally she tried to offer the fatherswho found her nephew money but they said ldquoThisis not about the money This is about the wretchedchildrenrdquo She tried to get the local newspapers andtelevision to cover the story The 400 word articlethat appeared in the local newspaper didnrsquot lead toany helpful action The TV coverage wasnrsquotfollowed up with any further stories Nothing re-sulted from it Xin Yanhua finally drafted the letterfrom the ldquo400 Fathers of the Missing Childrenrdquoand posted it in an Internet forum

The forum moderator placed the post in aprominent position on the Dahe Net forum andposted it with some of the photographs from theHenan TV Metro Channel coverage It was subse-quently reposted on the Tianya forum As of June18 the Dahe post generated more than 300000page views and the reposting of it at the Tianyaforum had generated more than 580000 pageviews and many many comments Many of thecomments expressed dismay that such conditionsexisted and expressed empathy for the victims andtheir families

A few weeks later Xin Yanhua posted a secondletter titled ldquoFailing to Find their Children 400Parents petition againrdquo

The media converged from around the countryto cover the story As a result of the posts and dis-

cussion on the Internet state officials issued direc-tives and the Shanxi and Henan provincialgovernments initiated an unprecedented campaignagainst the illegal brick kilns

When Xin Yanhua was asked why she haddone the posts she emphasized that she didnrsquotwant fame or credit The Internet had become theonly option to obtain aid for the situation She hadwanted to express her gratitude to the parents whohad rescued her nephew even though they hadnrsquotbeen able to find their own missing children Xinwanted to be able obtain justice

ldquoThis case is yet another in a growing list ofcases of citizen activism on the Chinese Internetand another sign that the government is listening tothe online chatterrdquo one post explained

I hope that these examples help to show thatldquoFocusing too closely on Internet censorship over-looks the expanded freedoms of expression madepossible in China by the Internetrdquo as one Chinesecomputer researcher has commented

ConclusionThe few examples I have had the time to pres-

ent are just the tip of an ice berg to indicate thatalready the Net and Netizens are having an impacton our society The impact on the role the pressand media play may have different expressions indifferent countries as my examples demonstratewith respect to South Korea Germany the USand China But in all these instances the Net andNetizens are having an impact not only on the roleof the media on society but on government activ-ity and on the very nature of the press itself

I want to draw your attention to a cartoon(httpwwwaisorg~jrhacncartoonppt) In thecartoon there are several scientists (palentologists)who have come to look for something they havebeen told is very large They are discussingwhether they should turn back as they donrsquot seeanything But if you look carefully at the cartoonyou can see that they are standing in the midst of ahuge footprint The problem is that it is so largethat they canrsquot see it

I want to propose that like the cartoon theInternet and Netizens are having an impact on oursociety which can be difficult to see but yet maybe very large I want to propose that we donrsquotmake the mistake of turning back because we canrsquotsee it